CONNECTIVITY
By Ronan Kelly CTO EMEA APAC
Adtran
www.adtran.com
15
Ultrafast broadband can increase prosperity if it’s
seen more as an essential utility than a simple service.
Ronan Kelly explores the potential offered by FTTx
Cities have risen and fallen throughout history, and
what was once a thriving capital may quickly become
tomorrow’s wasteland, and vice versa. In today’s world
we don’t need to worry about building our own fires or
gathering enough food for the winter, but that doesn’t
mean that it’s plain sailing from here on in. There are
countless factors that dictate whether an area thrives or
dies, even today.
These factors have taken a multitude of different forms
across the ages – a city built on a river equates to a water
supply, sewage disposal, and later, a source of electricity
to allow it to succeed far beyond its neighbouring towns.
While we’ve come a long way since then, certain factors
still influence a region’s success. And what’s the core
enabling factor of today’s world? Ultrafast broadband and
ubiquitous access, of course.
Take Chattanooga for example – a small city in
Tennessee in the United States. Like other early industrial
cities, Chattanooga fell victim to the economic decay
that swept through small town America in the late 80s
due to a range of socioeconomic challenges; from deindustrialisation to heightened unemployment rates.
A few decades on however, and thanks to an ambitious
rollout by the city’s municipally owned electricity company,
Chattanooga is now one of the few places on Earth
offering broadband speeds of up to 1Gbps to every home
and business (that’s almost 50 times the US average). In
turn, this led to a surge of start-ups setting up camp in the
city driving business and creating jobs in the process. This
peaked in 2011 when Volkswagen chose the city to home
its $1bn assembly plant headquarters. The result? Enabled
by gigabit broadband Chattanooga ditched its status
as a close to zero venture hub and, became a city with
investable capital of over $50m in j