Power to the People
By Ann Coulter, ‘04
At the recent Loeb 50th Reunion, Seitu Jones ‘02 said during his Loeb year he convinced his wife, Soyini Guyton to buy their first smart phones though she was skeptical of their usefulness. The year I was a Loeb, Facebook emerged from a Harvard dorm room and ads for the iPod covered subway station walls. Returning from Cambridge in 2004, my husband and I ditched our dial-up internet service for broadband.
As the digital forefront shot ahead, it rapidly outpaced efforts to confront the moral and ethical implications created in its wake. But Chattanooga TN is trying to grapple with some of them. At the heart of it is how a community develops or evolves a sense of its public self and its public responsibilities, at a fundamental level…what public means.
Chattanooga has the fastest, cheapest, most ubiquitous internet service in the US. EPB (Electric Power Board), the city’s publicly owned electric utility, provides fiber optic internet services to its entire 600 square mile service area (180,000 homes and businesses) in southeast Tennessee. I pay $58 a month for the basic 300 MBPS of upload and download speed. (The national average is 119 MBPS download/74 upload.) For $69 a month one gets 1 gigabit, and recently EPB announced a 25-gig service.
In 2000, EPB Telecom was launched, expanding beyond basic electricity services to becoming a full-fledged telecommunications firm. The primary mission remained to provide electricity in the most efficient, dependable and economical manner to all its customers. With help in 2009 from a stimulus grant EPB completed the installation of electronic sensors and communications technology, creating the smartest electricity grid in the US. The grid required high speed fiber optic cable…but that kind of digital asset could do much more than connect sensors to controls.
Despite multiple lawsuits from competitors Comcast and ATT, and losing a battle in the TN General Assembly for permission to expand internet service to communities beyond its area, EPB services were offered to all homes and businesses in 2011. As the system settled in, EPB increased speeds without cost increases. The benefits have been a non-stop boon to Chattanoogans. From 2010 to 2020 the smart city infrastructure provided $2.68 billion dollars to the local economy, mostly through job and business creation, reduced power outage, and energy conservation. Access by researchers and educational institutions to live, low latency streaming and high-speed computing have been game changers.
So why don’t more places in the US have this 21st century technology and the social and economic benefits it can bring? Most people don’t have a public internet provider like EPB that is motivated by improving quality of life rather than by corporate profits. Private telecom companies have successfully lobbied many state legislatures to prevent public utilities from competing with them. Federal Communications Commission rulings on digital discrimination remain in flux, with industry forces trying to water down net neutrality protections.
Meanwhile in Chattanooga the ramifications of having uniquely valuable publicly owned digital assets raised important questions. What more do we do with it? And for whom? There were few models to draw from, and only a handful of cities and towns with even small high speed public networks. I helped research ideas and models from around the US and most people, including those in Chattanooga found it hard to believe the asset even existed or that it was needed.
We cast a wide net for possible public internet applications and discovered Tech Goes Home, a successful computer literacy program in Boston. Within months, plans were firmed up to create Tech Goes Home (TGH) Chattanooga and classes began in January 2015. The program provides 15 hours of computer literacy training, a new Chromebook for $50 and free or reduced cost internet service to any Hamilton County household.
TGH began working with families of school-aged children because of their need be able to communicate with classroom teachers, complete assignments and get after school assistance. Demand for the program grew as people realized its ability to serve multiple constituencies. Courses could be taught in church basements, recreation centers, libraries or anywhere people could connect a computer to the internet. Most instructors were volunteers, many of them retired teachers. Course components could be customized to include job search skills or other computer skills beyond the basics. The program linked graduates to low and no-cost internet service after the program.
Clearly, fundamental needs of modern life, from banking to accessing supplemental nutrition benefits to filling out job applications or applying for Medicare require access to the internet. New vocabulary entered public discussion – digital divide, digital equity, digital literacy. TGH adapted programming to better connect a growing Latino population, the elderly, and people with disabilities.
Before the lengthy shutdown of schools during the pandemic, the school system worked to upgrade hardware necessary for schools to access high speed internet and to provide all children with personal tablets. When students were sent home in 2020 to learn remotely, Chattanooga was way ahead in providing instruction online, but a big problem remained – many households with children did not have internet service. Deepening the challenge were results from a study linking the lack of early educational success to employment and earnings. Zip code as destiny was the stark truth for children, with Hamilton County and TN among the worst in the nation.
The creation of EdConnect was another community example of the right to digital access. Shortly after the beginning of the pandemic, this $8.2 million effort was offering free internet to every public-school household in the county that qualifies for free or reduced lunch or supplemental nutrition assistance – close to 30,000 students in 17,000 households. Local public and private funders help with the costs since EPB’s industry regulations prevent it from providing free service. Within a year EPB connected close to half of eligible households to the service.
Several years ago, TN passed a law to upgrade the skill requirements for hundreds of early childhood workers around the state. This is good for children, but it meant their instructors had to be proficient on-line. Many workers were highly experienced and long-serving but had never needed the internet to do their jobs. They faced permanent loss of work in a job environment unfriendly to those not digitally literate. Working with a large local childcare provider, TGH was able to quickly provide training to these workers to upgrade their skills and prevent a loss of employment. Then the State of TN came calling. The same problem existed across the state and the result was a huge new effort funded by the TN Department of Human Services - Tech Goes Home Tennessee.
As a Loeb I began thinking about whether communities learn long lasting lessons from the common or public experiences of the people there, real-life lessons that mark identifiable change. With almost 20 years more since to explore this, I think the answer is that they can. And I think Chattanooga’s attempts decades ago to change its future as it faced a dying downtown and had the dirtiest air in the nation built a civic robustness that made it possible to address other issues fundamental to public life and the rights due to people as their public selves. The most recent efforts to me are the stories this article tells. Public life requires the right to public infrastructure that enables a common quality of life. In Chattanooga that infrastructure is much more than the physical public realm, it is the digital realm as well.