Google is bringing 1Gbps fiber connections to Kansas City, Kansas next year—but what can Kansans expect when the fiber arrives? Chattanooga, Tennesse provides a partial answer.

As the first US city to make 1Gbps fiber connections available to all, Chattanooga has been on the cutting edge of broadband deployment. Even fiber's backers admit there aren't many uses for a full 1Gbps connection at the moment, but they make a "build it and they will come" argument; provide the bandwidth and uses will materialize. Besides, once you've laid the fiber—why not roll out 1Gbps service?

Chattanooga's fiber network currently covers all 600 square miles serviced by the community-owned Electric Power Board (EPB), which has also provided electricity for decades. EPB rolled out a 1Gbps upgrade to the network last fall, but it "hasn't been flooded with calls" for the service, says David Wade, Chief Operating Officer of EPB.

Indeed, even this may be overstating current demand; only 6 or 7 Chattanooga residents and "several businesses" have ordered the high-end service, which launched with a $350 per month price tag.

Those who have ordered face challenges; if they want to experience the full 1Gbps speed they're paying for, standard WiFi connections aren't fast enough. Some customers have switched to wired gigabit routers in order to access their full bandwidth.

This doesn't particularly concern Wade. "We knew that the capacity had to be there before people could start creating applications that could utilize the capacity," he told me. "It's like bringing electricity to the Tennessee Valley" in the early twentieth century, he said. (EPB was founded in 1935.) Before power arrived, there were limited applications for it, but stringing power lines to every home and businesses provided a huge boost to the local economy and spurred all kinds of additional use. Just as with electrification, EPB has decided to run fiber to every home and business, including the third of its customers outside the city, because the benefits of fiber connections don't decline with population density.

This costs more, but EPB is a beneficiary. It uses the fiber to power its own "smart grid" electrical program, and deploying the program everywhere adds value to the electrical system. But once the fiber's in place, it can be used for TV, Internet, and phone service without digging any new trenches; indeed, even upgrading the entire network to support 1Gbps service was relatively inexpensive, since it only required an electronics upgrade at central locations. While few customers buy the 1Gbps tier, many use slower EPB Internet services, but at least the network is ready for the future at relatively minimal cost.

Cost drops over time, too. Wade noted that the optical network terminals—the boxes of homes and businesses that terminate a fiber connection and make it available to the home network—only supported 400Mbps speeds when Chattanooga began deploying them. Less than two years later, optical network terminals now reach gigabit speeds but cost less than the previous versions.

Network speeds are real—if you pay for 30Mbps, you get 30Mbps—and are symmetrical (the same speed in both directions). Chattanooga has also seen surprising use of its upstream connections, even though some question just how much uploading customers want to do. "If you're limiting upstream traffic, you're not going to see upstream traffic," Wade counters.

That attitude extends to all aspects of the network; build it for the future, not the present, and then encourage people to grow new applications that take advantage of abundance rather than conform to scarcity. (EPB has no caps on home Internet use.) To do this, EPB has signed on a sponsor of local business incubator Lamp Post Lab, which will bring undergrads to Chattanooga this summer in a coding competition designed to find the best uses for massive bandwidth. The winner gets $50,000 to turn their idea into a business.

The contest encourages people to "Come to Lamp Post Lab, build a company and maybe even change the world." That's exactly what Chattanooga wants to hear, and the city has been trumpeting its recent inclusion in a list of the world's "seven most intelligent communities." (Only two other US cities made the cut.)

"If we open the door to allow smart people to be smart, they usually take advantage of it," says Wade. He's in for a bit of competition; soon, Kansas City residents will be able to take advantage, too, and Google has already said it will work aggressively to develop new uses of its own for bigger bandwidth.