On May 13th and 14th get y'allselves to Altanta to attend Gigabit Cities Live 2015. The event will bring together members from the public, private, and non-profit sectors to explore how gigabit networks are changing local communities. 

From the event summary:

Gigabit Cities Live 2015 will deliver a highly ‘immersive’ experience for attendees, exploring everything from the infrastructure required to deploy ultra-high-speed networks to the applications these networks are enabling to how gigabit networks will transform communities.

... Meet decision-makers from all aspects of the Gigabit Cities ecosystem – from service providers to urban leaders to technology vendors to applications developers and more – to learn about different approaches and business models for gigabit network success.

Hear thought leaders, see new products and services and learn from peers and solutions providers, all under one roof.

Chris will participate in a panel discussion, Open Access and the Future, on the morning of Thursday the 14th, time to be determined.

This panel session focuses on Open Access broadband networks, the provision of infrastructure to competing carriers that serve end users. Open Access is one of the most talked-about concepts in the broadband and gigabit city community today. Panelists will provide insight into open access models and the treatment of passive broadband infrastructure as a mechanism to encourage competition on the local level, and spur economic investment and development.  This includes successful public-private partnership structures, various models of open access including structural separation and the results of early Open Access network developments in North America. Does Open Access ultimately deliver a vibrant, competitive marketplace for broadband access?

We finally see television news outlets asking the tough questions of bill pushed by powerful cable and telephone companies to prevent giving residents a real choice in cable and Internet service providers. We been covering this Georgia bill closely, and were glad to see this segment:

Chattanooga continues to receive attention because of the incredible community owned network they built for themselves. We recently came across an article from Tom Baxter of the Atlanta SaportaReport. In his article, Chattanooga: Eating our lunch in liveability, Baxter expresses the envy he feels as an Atlantan as he considers the way Chattanooga has transformed itself. From the article:

Yes, Chattanooga. Seldom do we think of our neighbor across the Tennessee line as much of a competitor. When they built an aquarium, we just built a bigger one. But for nearly three decades, since a group of civic leaders got together in 1984 and committed themselves to doing something about Chattanooga’s image as the dirtiest city in America, and in the view of some the dullest, they have been eating our lunch on the playing field of liveability.

Baxter mentions Georgia's HB 282, a bill we are following closely, and notes how its passage would drive more distance between livability in Georgia and the increasing quality of life in Chattanooga:

Chattanooga’s broadband system, the fastest in the Western Hemisphere,  could run at a gigabyte a second, if anybody could really use that kind of speed. Meanwhile, in Georgia, there’s a bill currently proposed which would prohibit public broadband carriers like the one in Chattanooga from expanding into any area if even one consumer in an entire census block has private broadband service of 1.5 megabytes a second or larger. (A gigabyte is equal to 1024 megabytes.)
...

Having a fiber-optic broadband system like Chattanooga’s  in 2013 is like having an airport like ours was in 1963. And in 2057, given recent climate projections, having several decades of experience in energy efficiency and green growth will be priceless.

We ignore this at our peril. Cities we used to ignore, like Chattanooga and Greenville, S.C., have made enormous strides over the past few decades because they’ve tried harder. That’s what they used to say about Atlanta.

We are glad to see that Tom gets it, but we had to offer a gentle correction in that network speeds are typically measured in megabits, not megabytes. His analysis is spot-on, just a bit of word confusion.