CHATTANOOGA IS TRYING TO lure geeks with wads of cash. It’s a nice town, if, you know, you can’t live in Knoxville for some reason . . . .

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When we think of American tech innovation, places like the Silicon Valley and Seattle tend to come to mind more readily than Chattanooga. But maybe we should give Tennessee’s fourth largest city a bit more credit. Last year, the city-owned Electric Power Board (EPB) brought the country’s first gigabit-per-second fiber optic network to more than 150,000 households and businesses in a 600-square-mile radius.

Jack Studer of Lamp Post Group, a “venture incubator” backing the Gig Tank, told Wired.com that his parents, who live on a farm 35 miles outside of Chattanooga, have access to the network. If you’re suddenly feeling very envious of a couple of farmers in rural Tennessee, you should be — according to The New York Times, the gigabit network allows for connections 200 times faster than the average broadband speed in America.

Read the whole thing. Hey, it’s a lot cheaper to live in Chattanooga than Palo Alto.