Bravo to Chattanooga! (Disclaimer: our president graduated from Vanderbilt, so the Blog Aesthetic has a soft spot for Tennessee!) The city, famous for … er, take your pick, now has a new claim to fame:
1GB per second internet service!
Let’s put that in everyday terms. If you want to download a song from iTunes, for example, the process would be complete in the time it takes to blink your eyes. An entire Blu-ray disc’s content would get zapped to you in about 3 minutes.
Of course, the current $350 per month price tag surely puts the service out of reach to, well, just about everyone. But that price will certainly drop over time, as it did for other services (consider that a decade ago, AOL monthly rates were significantly greater than options today).
In the meantime, the symbolic effect of Chattanooga’s new service is significant. Combined with the new Volkswagen plant and SimCenter engineering lab, the city is poised to brand itself as the next great corridor of technology and innovation. A smart public relations strategy will consistently link these three elements together to promote the city as a hub for tech investment and activity. With a little luck, the city will attract the kind of investment that will boost the local economy and make the name “Chattanooga” resonate with cutting-edge trends and thinking.
And that, friends, is how thought leadership in-a-bottle is done.
