What happens when a town owns its own internet?

The idea

Most people rent their internet from a company whose job is to make a profit from it. If a street doesn't pay enough, it waits. If a town has one provider, that provider sets the price.

A town that owns its network runs it the way it runs the water: to reach everyone, at a price that covers the cost. The profit, if any, stays in the town.

The Dynamo of Dixie

Chattanooga is not where anyone expected this to start. By the 1930s it was known as the "Dynamo of Dixie", a railway and factory town, home of the world's first Coca-Cola bottling plant. In 1969 the federal government declared it had the dirtiest air in the nation (Wikipedia, 2026a).

The city didn't accept that. In the mid-1980s local leaders launched Vision 2000, an effort to reinvent the city's culture and economy. The riverfront was rebuilt, the Walnut Street Bridge restored and the Tennessee Aquarium opened in 1992. Chattanooga lost more than 10% of its people in the 1980s and won them back over the next two decades, the only major US city to do so in that period (Wikipedia, 2026a).

So when the city turned to its internet, it already had the habit of deciding its future together.

A power company lays fibre

EPB started in 1935 as an independent board of the City of Chattanooga, selling electricity. It is still owned by the city (Wikipedia, 2026b).

In September 2010 EPB finished a 9,000-mile fibre network reaching every part of its area, and became the first provider in the US to offer 1 gigabit per second. In 2015 it offered 10 gigabits to the whole community, a world first, and in 2022 it announced 25 gigabits. It now serves nearly 180,000 homes and businesses across about 600 square miles (Wikipedia, 2026b).

The same fibre runs the power grid. More than 200,000 sensors and smart switches let the grid route around faults on its own. In one outage that cut power to more than 106,000 customers, the grid's automatic switching had 44,000 back within hours (Wikipedia, 2026b).

Did it pay?

Before the network existed, a University of Tennessee at Chattanooga economist, Bento Lobo, and two colleagues modelled what fibre to every home in the county might do. They estimated a $195.5 million project over ten years would create more than 2,600 jobs and over $352 million in income and taxes (Lobo et al., 2011).

A decade after the build, Lobo counted again. His 2021 study found $2.69 billion in benefits to the community in the first ten years, an estimated 9,516 jobs, and $244 million in business ventures that used the network (Lobo, 2021, as cited in Wikipedia, 2026b).

The city also used it to close a gap. EPB and the county schools run HCS EdConnect, which gives the family of every K–12 student on low income high-speed internet and a wireless router at no charge (Wikipedia, 2026b).

One piece of context keeps this honest. Across the US as a whole, researchers disagree about city networks, and one study found no evidence that they raise the number of people online (Wikipedia, 2026c). A city network isn't magic. Chattanooga's worked because it was built well, by an organisation that already knew every street.

Why don't more towns do it?

Because in much of the US, they aren't allowed to. As of 2023, 16 states had laws that restrict or frustrate city-run broadband (Wikipedia, 2026c).

Tennessee's law let EPB sell internet only inside its electricity area. Neighbouring towns asked to be connected. In 2015 the Federal Communications Commission ruled that such laws were barriers that stopped city networks competing, and overrode Tennessee's law, along with North Carolina's limits on the city of Wilson. On 10 August 2016 a federal appeals court reversed that ruling: the FCC, it held, had no power from Congress to override the states on this (Wikipedia, 2026d).

So the towns next door still wait. The law protects the existing providers, and it's the system that allows it, not any one person.

Farmers in Catalonia

Some communities didn't wait for a city at all. Guifi.net began in Catalonia in 2004, with people linking their own rooftop antennas into a shared network. In August 2009 its first fibre went into the ground in Gurb, a farming town, as "Fiber From The Farms" (Wikipedia, 2026e).

By December 2021 it had more than 37,000 active nodes and about 71,000 km of wireless links. It runs as a commons: anyone can see how it's built and add to it, and people share the cost instead of paying a profit. A foundation registered it as a telecommunications operator in 2009, and since 2011 it has connected to the Catalan internet exchange (Wikipedia, 2026e).

Australia built one too

Australia is one of the few countries that decided the whole national network should be public. In 2009 the Rudd government announced the National Broadband Network, to bring fibre to the premises at 100 megabits per second for 93% of people, with fixed wireless and satellite for the rest. NBN Co, owned by the federal government, builds the network and sells access only to retailers, who sell to us (Wikipedia, 2026f, 2026g).

In 2013 the Abbott government changed course to a "multi-technology mix": fibre to the node, which reuses the old copper for the last stretch, plus cable and other technologies. The argument was cost and time: demand for fibre everywhere wasn't high enough to justify the price or the wait. The minimum speed target fell to 25 megabits per second (Wikipedia, 2026f).

That argument had a fair point; fibre is expensive. But copper decays, and where it's degraded, speed and reliability suffer. By late 2018 the network had cost about $51 billion, and in December 2019 Australia ranked 68th in the world for internet speed, fourth-slowest in the OECD (Wikipedia, 2026f).

The good news is that both sides came back to fibre. In 2020 the Coalition announced a $4.5 billion upgrade. In 2025 the Labor government committed $4 billion to move 95% of premises on fibre to the node onto full fibre by 2030 (Wikipedia, 2026f). The network is still public, and it's still ours to improve.

What we can do

• Check your own line. NBN Co's address check shows what technology reaches your home and whether a free fibre upgrade is on offer.
• Treat the network as ours. Australians already own a national network. Ask your MP how it will be upgraded, and whether it will stay public.
• Look local. Councils, power companies and neighbours can share cost the way Chattanooga and Gurb did. When phones need to talk without any network at all, see Can phones message each other without the internet?

A factory town with the dirtiest air in America decided the internet was like water: something everyone needs, so everyone should own it. Next time someone says a public network can't work, ask them about Chattanooga.