After Comcast failed to block a municipal fiber broadband network, the city of Chattanooga, Tenn., via EFB Fiber Optics, will offer what it bills as the fastest home Internet connection speed in the world.
In Chattanooga, the local Electric Power Board has built-out a large, fiber-to-home network despite years of legal wrangling from Comcast, which offers a similar 2 gigabit service in the area.
Comcast sued local authorities claiming the fiber buildout was being subsidized by ratepayer dollars; the challenge failed in court.
The Federal Communications Commission took a firm stand on the side of municipalities looking to roll out proprietary broadband, despite opposition from major Internet service providers last year.
At the time, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said: “If the people, acting through their elected local governments, want to pursue competitive community broadband, they shouldn’t be stopped by state laws promoted by cable and telephone companies that don’t want the competition.” He gave the example of Chattanooga.
EFB Fiber Optics touts its new 10 GB service as providing “enough bandwidth to stream 1,754 online movies all at the same time – in HD – from a single Internet connection without experiencing any buffering or lag time. While that’s more bandwidth than you can imagine needing now – it’s an enormous blank slate of possibility for whatever opportunities innovative thinkers can dream up next.”
The 10 GB service package costs $299 per month with no contracts, cancellation fees or installations fees.
EFB Fiber Optics explained customers may need hardware upgrades to computers with 8 GB of memory or higher, processors like the Intel i5 3.2GHZ or AMD FX-8120, a newer operating system and a PCIx hard drive with sequential read/write over of 1.25 gigabits per second. On the router side, customers will need a 1 X 10 Gbps Ethernet port equipped with 850nm optics.
