![]() That includes $8.2 million upfront to fund the cost of connecting homes to broadband. This is an expensive undertaking, and Deb Socia, the CEO of the Enterprise Center, says the total cost will be $15 million over ten years to fund broadband connectivity. HCS EdConnect has pledged that all low-income students in Hamilton County will have free broadband for the next ten years. This is a collaboration between the EPB fiber business, the City of Chattanooga, Hamilton County, Hamilton County Schools, a local non-profit the Enterprise Center, and several private funders. The community has come together to create a partnership called HCS EdConnect. The county also has a lot of students that live outside of the footprint of the fiber network. ![]() Even before the pandemic, EPB had offered a low-cost broadband product for $26.99 that had reached about 10% of the homes in the community – but EPB found that even that price was a barrier for a lot of households. The community is responding in a big way and has decided to solve the homework gap in the county, by making sure that every home with a student has broadband access. At the start of the pandemic, the school districts quickly discovered that roughly one-third of the 45,000 households with students didn’t have home broadband, making remote school impossible. ![]() Witness the huge undertaking in Hamilton County, Tennessee, home to Chattanooga’s municipal EPB fiber broadband network. What those skeptics are missing is the immense benefits that a municipal broadband network can bring to a community. There are plenty of skeptics that deride municipal broadband for various reasons, mostly centered on whether local government should be competing against commercial ISPs.
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