Many residents of Chattanooga, Tenn., a city of about 175,000 nestled in the Appalachian Mountain foothills, lacked a signature feature of modern American life just eight years ago: high-speed internet in their homes and businesses.
City authorities decided that if Chattanooga was going to have a solid high-speed network, it would have to build one itself.
Today, city residents have a municipal network that offers some of the fastest broadband internet service in the country for 80,000 homes and businesses within a 600-mile radius. But along the way, the city faced lawsuits. When it moved to expand its network in ...