What can you do with a gig? There is a residential customer in Clarksville, Tennessee, that knows. CDE Lightband, Clarksville's municipal provider, recently began offering 1 gig service for $349.95 per month. The Leaf Chronicle recently reported that CDE Lightband also just signed on its first 1 gig residential customer.

CDE Lightband offers triple play and is part of the Clarksville Department of Electricity. Clarksville is a fast growing city with around 133,000 located along the northwestern border of the state. In addition to the 1 gig service, CDE Lightband offers speeds from 10 - 100 Mbps symmetrical and a variety of smartly priced packages.

While 1 gig of service will make life faster for the residential customers who choose it, community leaders also see the possibilities for the community as a whole. From the article:

"Opportunities for education, health and industrial uses are unlimited with the 1 gigabit of Internet services that CDE Lightband now offers, and it helps to position our community for further economic growth,” Clarksville Mayor Kim McMillan said in the [press] release.

Congrats to CDE Lightband, its new 1 gig customer, and the Clarksville community!

• Communities around Rutland in Vermont are moving forward with a planned universal full fiber-to-the-home network. Interestingly, this network has been spear-headed by the Rutland Redevelopment Authority, not a local City Hall.

• Back in Tennessee, the Clarksville Fiber Network is running ahead of schedule.

  Having reached the 6,000-customer mark, CDE Lightband's broadband service is slightly ahead of schedule in adding new subscribers, an official of the Clarksville utility said Wednesday — good news for a telecommunications division, which is still in its infancy. Initial projections had the utility servicing around 8,000 broadband subscribers by next June. ... New installations usually have about a six-week wait, primarily because of high demand, Batts said.

  Though demand is high, the goal of profitability is still a ways off — around 4,000 additional customers are needed to push the utility's telecommunications into the black, according to early department projections.

• Seattle's new mayor campaigned on building a publicly owned, full fiber-to-the-home network. Reclaim the Media asks if Seattle will get its broadband 'public option.'

  As Reclaim the Media noted last summer, the main obstacles to moving forward with next-generation fiber to underserved areas in Seattle are (1) money and (2) political will. The city budget remains in slash-and-burn territory this year; next year's budget would be the earliest that the new Mayor would be able to effectively push a significant new priority. This winter, however, Schrier's office will be able to apply for federal broadband stimulus funds to build out the skeleton of a citywide fiber network (possibly in collaboration with Seattle City Light), and to provide actual door-to-door "fiber to the premises" (FTTP) service to underserved neighborhoods in the Central District and Beacon Hill. McGinn's leadership will be key in making this project happen.

Some shorter news items from this weeks' news:

• The Salisbury Post continues it in-depth coverage of Salisbury's FTTH network as it moves from planning to deployment.

  

  Salisbury may be a great example of just how a community should build a network. They have opened many chains of communication with citizens to keep everyone involved in the process:

  To get the message out about their fiber-to-the-home cable utility now under construction, Salisbury city officials already have conducted radio, newspaper and magazine interviews.

  The city also hopes to provide daily "fiber" updates on its blog (www.salisburyftthblog.com) and have a continuing newspaper advertisement called "Straight Talk about Fiber" in the Post.

  Any community considering the hard path of building one of these networks should take note of how Salisbury is ensuring citizens know what is happening and why this network is important to the city's future.

• Clarksville Department of Electricity (CDE) Lightband creates local careers as they roll out the FTTH network that will deliver triple play services. They also have a spiffy video:

  This video is no longer available
• 

  Garn Anderson, of the Knight Center of Digital Excellence says "Smart Infrastructure starts with planning."

  The success in and around Cleveland demonstrates not only the benefits of Smart Infrastructure, but also the reality that local communities are best equipped to implement today's fundamental need for infrastructure that empowers innovation.

  He expands on those thoughts in a post on the Community Connections blog.