If you are lucky enough to live in the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee then you probably have to option to select EPB Fiber Optics as your Internet, television and phone provider. I recently signed up for the Fi-Speed Internet 20 package, which promises 20MB of bandwidth both up and down for $70 a month. Today, EPB upped the amount of bandwidth to 50MB up and down for the same price – $70 per month. Yes, you read that correctly. I live in Chattanooga, Tennessee (during the workweek) and I pay $70 a month for 50MBps of synchronous bandwidth. The image included in this blog post shows that the speeds aren’t just advertising. Of course, the Internet flows a lot like a river – there are bottlenecks. In three different speed tests to three different locations at varying physical distances from my node, I got speeds as low as 7.74MBps up and as high as 56.73 MBps down.
Having paid as much as $100 a month for much, much slower service in years past I can definitively tell people who make their living surfing the web from home that Chattanooga is a good place to live if you love cheap bandwidth. EPB Fiber isn’t just cheap and plentiful bandwidth though. They have great customer service and quick turnaround on change requests. If you’re unfortunate enough to have lived somewhere served by a non-customer oriented monopoly provider like Frontier Communications you’ll really appreciate EPB if you get the chance to sign up for their service. Where Frontier tells you the speed will be 1.5MBps and delivers 1/10th of that on a good day, EPB tells you that you’ll get 10 times that much for the same price and then delivers double what they promised consistently. Maybe that is why Frontier gets and overall rating of 62% satisfaction from its customers while EPB has a 100% positive review rate from its customers – even one guy who complained about a billing problem said the service was great.
If you have a hefty disposable income and live in Chattanooga, you can get 100MBps up and down, unlimited domestic calling and every television channel you could possible ever want from EPB Fiber for $286.41 a month. That would have been a crazy idea five years ago. Americans should be screaming for bandwidth like this at these prices. South Korea is way ahead of most of the U.S. in average data pipe size and speed. That’s a game changer when it comes to be intellectually and economically competitive.
For total Internet connectivity, the study ranks the US fifth worldwide, but 15th in broadband penetration. Akamai defines “broadband” (perhaps rather generously) as 2Mbps or higher. Compared to speedier countries, the US ranked a lowly 35th place, with just 57 percent of connections at 2Mbps or higher. The US fared better when comparing the percentage of connections with “high broadband” speeds of 5Mbps or higher. Here, the US ranked 12th globally, with 24 percent of its connections counted as “high broadband.”
If you happen to live in Chattanooga though, you can get better or at least equivalent broadband to the average South Korean. That’s worth a lot if a fat data pipe is your version of heroin. If you don’t plan to move to Chattanooga at least scream for your local officials to visit Chattanooga and learn a lesson or two about how to get real broadband going in your chosen community.