The fourth largest city in Tennessee is about to get the fastest municipally provided Internet and IP video service in the United States. Chattanooga's city-owned EPB Fiber Optics promises that its residents will soon be able to buy "Fi-Speed Internet 150"—fiber-to-the-home broadband with down and upload speeds of 150Mbps.

"The question we've all heard is 'when do we have the fiber at my house'?" EPB President Harold DePriest told the Chattanooga Times Free Press on Wednesday. "We will have all our customers in Chattanooga, East Ridge, and Red Bank served by the end of this month. And we will have all our customers throughout this system served by the end of this year."

No surprise

That puts Chattanooga ten years ahead of the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan, with its comparatively modest goal of 100Mbps for 260 million households by 2020. EPB, which also provides electricity to Chattanoogans, already offers that speed. The company's coverage area spreads out across 600 square miles of Chattanooga, Hamilton County, and various other counties in Southeast Tennessee and North Georgia.

"Though it may seem surprising to some, Chattanooga is light years ahead when it comes to advanced communications availability," bragged the city's mayor Ron Littlefield in a press release. This latest fiber rollout will cost EPB about $220 million and add an Internet-based smart grid system to the region.

None of this was welcomed by Chattanooga's incumbents, however, who filed lawsuits to stop the project. Our state-by-state map of attitudes towards muni-broadband indicates that Tennessee isn't the most hostile state to the concept, but it isn't the most accepting, either.

The cable companies and telcos charged that EPB was unfairly subsidizing some of its Internet/TV services with electricity utility revenue. A county court dismissed one suit filed by the Tennessee Cable Telecommunications Association in 2008. And the city, whose residents voted to approve the fiber initiative, also fought back with a public relations campaign, pledging that the project will serve as an investment magnet.

"The kind of network that is being built in Chattanooga today is exactly what companies like Google are imploring cities in this country to focus their efforts on," Littlefield added.

So now that there's some serious broadband competition in that region, what kind of choices do Chattanoogans have?

Get it all

EPB's service doesn't come cheap. We're guessing that a big chunk of its extant 9,600 customers buy the company's Fi-Speed Internet 15 plan (15Mbps), sold at $57.99 a month "excluding taxes and fees." Fi-Speed 20Mbps is $69.99 a month, followed by 50Mbps for $174.99 and 100Mbps for $349.99. No word yet what price tag EPB will put on 150, but we figure it will be pricey enough to fall into the "business broadband" category.

We looked up the tiers and rates for one of EPB's competitors, Comcast, and found plans that seem somewhat more affordable, at least at first glance. Comcast offers a tier of "up to" 12/2Mbps for $19.99. The fastest speed the cable company provides in that area is $99.95 for its "Extreme 50" service (50/10Mbps).

But that $19.99 tier is an introductory deal that goes up to $42.95 after six months, and all of Comcast's intro rates are for consumers who already buy Comcast cable or Comcast digital voice service.

Meanwhile, you can get EPB's "Get It All" Fi-Internet 20, Fi-Phone, and Fi-Cable TV plan for $130.36. Comcast's basic "Triple Play" plan is advertised at $99 a month for the first year, and eventually goes up to $129.99. We couldn't figure out what kind of Internet speed consumers get with this plan. All the relevant page says is that the service is "way faster than DSL."

Still, even if that "way faster" speed is only at Comcast's 12/2Mbps rate, it's all good news for the people of Chattanooga, who now have two carriers that serve up Internet at tiers that make telco/copper wire DSL look silly.

For example, the region's AT&T/BellSouth DSL offers speeds of up to 3Mbps. And Frontier Communications, which plans to roll out DSL to a significant portion of the South, has promised the FCC that it will provide at least 4Mbps to 85 percent of its newly purchased lines by the last day of 2015. That's 96Mbps short of the Commission's National Broadband Plan goal, and 146Mbps short of what EPB is now offering Chattanooga.

Forbes magazine already ranks the Chattanooga metropolitan area number eight on its list of "bang-for-the-buck" cities. Let's see where 150Mbps broadband puts the region two years from now.