Chattanooga is not quite San Francisco, but the Tennessee city can now boast something that even Silicon Valley can’t: It is the first city in the U.S. to offer a fiber-optic network with a gigabit per second Internet speed, which is 50 times faster than the national broadband average.

The fiber-optic network is the latest in a series of developments to raise the 175-year-old city’s profile, which began with downtown redevelopment. The Tennessee Aquarium and a $120 million real estate project on Tennesssee River waterfront lead to a major coup in the form of a $1 billion Volkswagen assembly plant announced in 2008. The Southern municipality’s government used $111 million in federal stimulus money allocated in 2009 to build out the network, which leaders hope will help growth the tech sector.

Historically, Chattanooga was better known for factories that produced smoke and soot. In a 1969 federal study, the city was called the most-polluted U.S. city. Local officials have put in effort over the past several decades to turn the city into a tech hub and the fiber-optic network is in place ahead of cities such as Atlanta and Nashville, where Internet providers AT&T and Google are at work on similar networks, according to the Associated Press.

Chattanooga officials and local tech entrepreneurs are putting their best foot forward and hope to build on the momentum with a number of tech startups already slated to move in to take advantage of the government-owned broadband network. Among the companies now calling “Gig City” home are 3D Ops, which produces anatomical replicas from MRI or CT scans; Feetz, which makes shoes using 3-D printing technology; and logistics service Bellhops.

Aaron Welch, a local entrepreneur who sold his restaurant reservations startup for $11.5 million, said Chattanooga is “an old town with a new vision.”