The City of Danville, Virginia has a backlog of businesses waiting to get connected to its brand new open multi-service network (also sometimes called an open service provider network). Two service providers are offering business services on the network, and a local provider is delighted with being able to offer fiber services to its existing customers.
Two years ago, the City decided to leverage its existing city fiber infrastructure to make it available everywhere, but with a special focus on being able to provide any level of bandwidth a business wanted, and the city's fiber infrastructure is able to deliver it. Danville has a very simple definition of broadband:
Broadband in Danville is any amount of bandwidth your business needs to be competitive in the global knowledge economy.
Notice there is no number attached to that definition; any time a community defines broadband as a specific number (e.g. broadband is 2 megabits, or ten megabits, etc.), from an economic development perspective, the community is telling some businesses, "Don't locate here because we don't have the capacity to serve you." It's no different than not having enough water or sewer capacity.
More information about the project is on the nDanville Web site. Disclaimer: Design Nine is providing broadband architecture and consulting services to the City of Danville for the project.