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Monday, February 10th, 2014

One American City Enjoys a Hyperfast Internet — Any Surprise Corporations Don’t Control It?

Author:     The Thom Hartmann Show
Source:     AlterNet (U.S.)
Publication Date:     4-Feb-14
 Link: One American City Enjoys a Hyperfast Internet — Any Surprise Corporations Don’t Control It?
Stephan:   Here is some good news. In the U.S., where the internet was created, by the standards of the developed world we have mediocre internet speeds. If you live in Singapore, or South Korea, or Japan for instance and you come to the U.S. the poor internet speeds available are a constant irritant. Because we have been brainwashed to believe we have the biggest and best of everything, most Americans have no idea how second rate our electronic infrastructure actually is. But it does not have to be that way, as this report spells out.

It’s time for high-speed internet access for all!

This morning, President Obama spoke to a crowd at a middle school in Adelphi, Maryland about the importance of high-speed internet access for America’s students.

But while high-speed internet access may still seem out-of-reach for many Americans, down in Chattanooga, Tennessee it’s been a reality for a long time.

That’s because Chattanooga is home to ‘The Gig,” a taxpayer-owned, high-speed fiber-optic network.

According to The New York Times [3], back in 2009, Chattanooga received a $111 million stimulus grant from the federal government, which allowed that city to get ‘The Gig” up and running.

Maintained and operated by Chattanooga’s publicly-owned utility company EPB, ‘The Gig” allows Chattanooga’s residents to surf the web at lightning-fast speeds.

For less than $70 per month, residents browse the World Wide Web on a high-speed fiber-optic connection that shoots data back and forth at one gigabit per second – that’s 1000 megabytes per second. Where I live in Washington, D.C., you have to pay a lot just to get a 20 megabit-per-second connection.

As The New York Times points out, one gigabit-per-second is 50 times faster than the average internet speed for homes in the rest of the US, and is just as fast […]

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