Earlier this week, the New York Times posted an inspiring article by Thomas Friedman promoting a focus on better broadband at the national level. Friedman starts by describing a transcontinental duet between T-Bone Burnett, a Grammy Award winner, and Chuck Mead, a founder of the band BR549. Burnett played from a studio in Los Angeles; Mead played in Chattanooga. The concert was made possible with broadband…

The transcontinental duet was possible, reported Chattanoogan.com, because the latency of Chattanooga’s new fiber network was 67 milliseconds, meaning the audio and video traveled 2,100 miles from Chattanooga to Los Angeles in one-fourth the blink of an eye.

Friedman gives a nice nod to the economic benefits reaped through the fiber investment – and makes the case we should be looking at similar investment for the country…

There is a huge amount of innovative thrust building, bottom-up, in the U.S. economy today. If Washington could just get the macro picture right, you could see a real growth surge in America.

It may be time for all of us to look ourselves in the eye and honestly assess our futures with and without investment…

And that brings me back to Chattanooga, where, Mayor Ron Littlefield says, city elders looked themselves in the eyes 15 years ago and realized that “we were a dilapidated city going the way of the Rust Belt.” But, by coming together to make the city an attractive place to live and getting both parties to agree to invest in a fiber-to-every-home-and-business network in a 600-square-mile area, Chattanooga replaced its belching smokestacks with an Amazon.com fulfillment center, major health care and insurance companies and a beehive of tech start-ups that all thrive on big data and super-high-speed Internet. “We’ve gone from being a slowly declining and deflating urban balloon, to one of the fastest-growing cities in Tennessee,” said Littlefield. The fiber network now attracts companies that “like to see more and more of their employees able to work some of the time at home, which saves on office space and parking,” the mayor said.