【正文】 T responded by announcing its own gigabit work. 13 CommunityBased Broadband Where the market does not generate the optimal level of petition or investment, the public sector can step in to make investments, encourage petition and provide choice to consumers. For example, government infrastructure investments, such as those made by the Department of Commerce and Department of Agriculture or by Massachusetts (as described below), may be able to put in place the ―middle mile‖ work that lowers costs of entering the ―last mile‖ market. These investments can attract the private sector or provide local governments the opportunity to build their own systems at much lower prices. Antitrust and telemunications policies can also promote petition. At the Federal level, the Department of Justice has an important role to play in preventing the unlawful acquisition or abuse of market power. The Telemunications Act of 1996 also empowers the FCC to regulate service providers in a manner that promotes petition both within and between technologybased platforms such as cable, cellular, satellite, and wireless. The President‘s recent call for strong Net Neutrality rules to ensure that no pany can act as a gatekeeper to Inter content are fundamentally about preserving access and petition in the digital marketplace. And states have an important role in promoting petition and ensuring fairness in their local munications markets. But these federal and state initiatives are only part of the solution. Local governments also have a critical role to play. In markets where private petition is anemic, whether because of regulatory barriers to entry or the high fixed costs of infrastructure investment, town and cities can build their own middlemile works and offer petitive access to the private sector, as Scott County, MN has done. Or municipalities can provide service directly to consumers, like in Chattanooga, TN. In either case, municipalities are creating more choices for consumers, fostering petition and creating opportunities for economic growth. Municipal broadband is often a logical choice for towns and cities that are already served by a municipal electric utility, since infrastructure costs can be shared across those two services, just as private cable panies leveraged their works to provide Inter service. Hundreds of towns and cities around the country have experimented with these works and created tremendous benefits for consumers and businesses. APPENDIX 1 includes a full list of municipal works around the country. Today, however, there are barriers to munityowned broadband in 19 states around the country. The Obama Administration believes that consumers should have the option to provide themselves broadband services through local government and locallyowned utilities and that state and local policy should support a level playing field for these munitybased solutions. This section considers several detailed case studies of municipal broadband initiatives and their benefits for consumers, businesses and munities. Chattanooga, TN: Gigabit service drives investment, innovation 14 In 20xx, Chattanooga‘s Electric Power Board (EPB), a municipallyowned utility, announced a 10 year plan to build out a fiber work to serve all of Chattanooga. Based on their analysis, EPB had determined that investments in the work could both drive a smart grid system that would generate significant savings by increasing the reliability of its electricity and also provide customers with improved munication services. In 20xx, EPB began offering its tripleplay services—Inter, phone, and cable television. Since 20xx, EPB has upgraded the midtier consumer service from 15 to 30, from 30 to 50, and from 50 to 100 Mbps, without raising costs. In 20xx, EPB announced it would offer the first 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) service in the United States. Today, EPB operates 8,000 miles of fiber for 60,000 residential and 4,500 business customers out of a potential 160,000 homes and businesses. EPB‘s efforts have encouraged other tele firms to improve their own service. In 20xx, for example, Comcast responded to the threat of EPB‘s entrance into the market by investing $15 million in the area to launch the Xfinity service – offering the service in Chattanooga before it was available in Atlanta, GA. More recently, Comcast has started offering lowcost introductory offers and gift cards to consumers to incentivize service switching. Despite these improvements, on an equivalent service basis, EPB‘s costs remain significantly lower. EPB‘s investments are reshaping Chattanooga‘s economic landscape. The gigabit broadband service has helped the City attract a new munity of puter engineers, tech entrepreneurs and investors. For example, local entrepreneurs have anized Lamp Post, a venture incubator that provides capital and mentorship to startups. Lamp Post now has over 150 employees in a 31,000 square foot office space in downtown Chattanooga. , a local nonprofit anization, provides shared working space, access to investor works and hosts the annual summer GITANK program, a 14week business accelerator. The investment munity has responded in kind. Since 20xx, Chattanooga has gone from close to zero venture capital to at least five anized funds with investable capital of over $50 million. The growing tech ecosystem has been profiled by the New York Times, Washington Post and The Atlantic. While the broadband work is opening up new economic pathways, EPB itself remains the most important customer for the fiber work, which it has used to develop one of the nation‘s leading smart grids. The smart grid, which involves 170,000 intelligent electric meters all reporting every