How blazing Internet speeds helped Chattanooga shed its smokestack past

For Road Trip 2015, CNET looks at how one Southern city's embrace of superfast Internet turned it into a magnet for tech entrepreneurs.

Chattanooga has spent decades cleaning up its city, which is now known for its outdoorsy lifestyle. It's also home to the largest and fastest broadband network in the US. CNET/Marguerite Reardon

CHATTANOOGA, Tennessee -- It was once so polluted here that people had to drive through town with their headlights on all day. You could smell the stench from the tannery and heavy metal foundries in town before reaching the city limits. In 1969, news anchor Walter Cronkite dubbed it "the dirtiest city in America."

"Cronkite and others had basically written us off for dead," said former Chattanooga mayor Ron Littlefield. "That day was a wakeup call to turn ourselves around."

The old Chattanooga is long gone. Today, the city has some of the cleanest air and water in the region. Outdoor Magazine has twice in the past four years named the city the "best town ever." Instead of smokestacks and foundries, you'll see rock-climbing enthusiasts scaling the outdoor wall of High Point Climbing and Fitness on Broad Street -- just a block away from the city's revitalized waterfront and the nation's largest freshwater aquarium. And rather than a dirty, polluted river running through the center of town, you'll see kayakers and standup paddle boarders drifting along a rejuvenated Tennessee River.

Chattanooga's transformation has been decades in the making, but the construction of one of the largest and fastest Internet networks in the Western Hemisphere will be key to helping the city write the next chapter for the 21st century. The city represents the vanguard of communities pushing for better Internet service and serves as a model for the benefits that can stem from broader online access. The Gig, as the locals call its network, has attracted billions of dollars in new investment and a flock of entrepreneurs to the city, who may come to the city for the promise of superfast broadband, but stay for the easy, affordable lifestyle, abundant outdoor activities and hip culture.

Chattanooga may seem like an unlikely place for a tech hub, but a long history of progressive thinking has put the midsize southeastern city -- two hours north of Atlanta -- in an enviable position. In 2010, Chattanooga turned on its so-called gigabit service, an industry term for a network able to connect to the Internet at 1 gigabit per second, or 50 to 100 times faster than your average US Internet connection, through a faster fiber-optic line. That was two years before Google broke ground on its first gigabit market in Kansas City.

Today, the network, which has been recognized as a model of innovation by President Barack Obama, is the largest and longest-running deployment of gigabit broadband in the nation, spanning 600 square miles and covering the entire population of Chattanooga -- 170,000 -- with access to ultra high-speed broadband.