A new report by EPB, a municipal utility that serves a 600-square-mile area including Chattanooga, Tenn., and surrounding parts of Hamilton and neighboring counties, found the economic impact of EPB’s high-speed fiber-optic broadband infrastructure has exceeded $5.3 billion and helped to generate more than 10,400 jobs in the region, since the system was launched 15 years ago.
Chattanooga made headlines more than a decade ago with its “Gig City” moniker as the city became more forward-looking, turning to the possibilities of technology to both improve the lives of residents and signal to the wider world its aim to compete in a digitally connected economy.
“The City of Chattanooga’s fiber infrastructure helped the city transition from a manufacturing-heavy economy to a hub for innovation and entrepreneurship,” Stephanie Cepak, press secretary for Mayor Tim Kelly, said in an email. “Economic development depends on a skilled and connected workforce. Fiber infrastructure allows cities to bridge the digital divide, ensuring that economic opportunities are accessible to all residents.”
To become the Gig City, EPB led the development of a $396 million fiber broadband infrastructure project, intended first of all to enable new “smart grid” technologies around automation and other features to improve efficiencies and reduce outages, said William Plank, community economist for EPB, and a contributor to the report, “From Gig City to Quantum City: The Value of Fiber Optic Infrastructure in Hamilton County, TN 2011-2035.”
“For us, having that resiliency and reliability in an innovative way through the smart grid is a huge deal,” Plank said, explaining how the smart grid was the focus of the project when it was conceived, and “fiber to the residents was something that just came naturally with that.”
It wasn’t just EPB that was made smarter with fiber infrastructure. City operations were improved as well. This allowed Chattanooga to turn to more smart city technologies made possible by AI and lidar, to analyze traffic in real time, and reduce congestion and improve pedestrian safety, Cepak said.
“Fiber bandwidth allows for real-time intelligence centers and high-definition video analysis to assist law enforcement,” Cepak said. “The city runs on Google Workspace and all the tools available on that platform to help ensure we are responsive to constituents.”
EPB officials look back on their investment in the fiber project as a clear investment in the community. Jim Ingraham, vice president for strategic research at EPB, points to the rise in household income, from $36,000 when the fiber network was first launched to $72,500 in 2024.
“So, we have more people in town today that are making more money,” Ingraham said. “The community has become wealthier, as a result of this investment.”
Other communities are also moving forward with their fiber-optic broadband projects. The city of Chico in northern California recently broke ground on its own municipal utility fiber project and has installed 130,000 linear feet of fiber infrastructure — about 65 percent of the project’s coverage area, Josh Marquis, Chico deputy director for information systems said. The city was able to aggregate a mixture of federal, state and local funds to launch its own fiber infrastructure project, a roughly $19 million initiative serving about 9,100 locations or roughly one-fifth of the city.
Chico moved forward with the project partly due to a lack of broadband Internet options available to residents. The city only has two Internet service providers: one cable service and a digital subscriber line service, which Marquis described as “very over-provisioned in our area.”
“We decided, well, it looks like no one’s going to do it for us, and … we decided the only way forward to make a reasonable change was to start our own fiber utility,” he said.
The new infrastructure aims to bring the monthly Internet service plan cost down from about $120 to around $40 to $50.
EPB officials in Chattanooga point to the stable cost of monthly broadband subscriptions as part of its success story. The affordable nature of the gigabit fiber broadband service has facilitated and expanded the use of modern-day expectations like telehealth or remote work, and helped to make Chattanooga an attractive place to live. In the 2024 fiscal year, EPB provided electricity to 198,000 customers and broadband Internet service to roughly 122,000 customers, with its ISP division, which provides that service, contributing to about 23 percent of total EPB revenue, according to the report.
Fiber was the preferred technology for the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program, part of the federal 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which aimed to close the digital divide by deploying broadband to largely rural and hard-to-reach locations across the nation. The second Trump administration has issued new guidance around technology and equity. Its format preference now allows for low-Earth orbit satellite service providers like Starlink.
Plank said each community should make its own determination around what technology works.
“Fiber worked really well for us,” he said. “But, if you’re looking at other communities, they need to do an assessment of, what is their community asking for? What does their community really need this service for?” he said.
Chico officials considered the long-term picture, opting for technology that would remain operational and relevant 20, 30 years into the future, Marquis said.
“I think if you look at the network as infrastructure, which I do, and if it’s critical infrastructure, and you’re looking at the 20-, 30-year cost, I think fiber is the only viable long-term solution that can provide speeds that can compete over that term,” he said. “It’s more expensive up front. But when you look at that 20-, 30-year time frame, I think it’s cheaper.”
“We’re moving from an information age, to what I believe will be a quantum age,” Plank said. “We want to be able to build a quantum Internet in the next decade to replace our 25-gig Internet service. So we stay on the cutting edge.”
