16 Oct You thought Google Fiber was fast? This city’s Internet just got 10 times faster.
The city of Chattanooga, Tenn. is rolling out a whopping 10-fold speed increase for customers of its publicly owned Internet service, enabling download rates that leave Google Fiber in the dust.
Residents can now sign up for a 10 gigabit-per-second plan, allowing them to download an HD movie in less than a second.
The plan certainly isn’t cheap, at $300 a month. You might wonder why anyone would even want such a service. But as more of our everyday objects become smart appliances, our bandwidth consumption is set to exceed expectations. And this new service from Chattanooga offers more evidence that a national race to 10 Gbps is on.
Chattanooga is best known among tech wonks as the city that was selling Google Fiber-like speeds to its residents years before Google Fiber was even a thing. As Google, Comcast and other players have built out their own next-gen networks, however, Chattanooga has forged ahead again. In addition to the 10 Gbps residential service, the city’s electric utility, EPB (which also manages the public broadband service) has also begun offering 3 Gbps and 5 Gbps plans to business customers. EPB declined to disclose the price of those rates.