How Chattanooga used fiber to buoy the rest of its tech community

In 2010, J.Ed Marston — then the vice president of marketing for the Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce — was tasked with pitching new media outlets about one of the city’s latest high-tech offerings. The city’s utility provider, Electrical Power Board of Chattanooga, had created its own fiber optic network that was capable of delivering internet speeds of 1 gigabit per second to all residents.
The problem that Marston encountered wasn’t that media outlets weren’