Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund aims to jumpstart gigabit Internet in the U.S.

Less talking and more doing. That’s what officials from international technology company Mozilla promised Thursday as the company launched a $150,000 fund to figure out ways to practically apply Chattanooga’s gigabit Internet to solve real, local problems. The Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund will give grants ranging from $5,000 to $30,000 to teams of Chattanoogans who promise to create tangible applications from Chattanooga’s gigabit network during 2014. 

Mozilla, maker of the popular Firefox web browser, is putting its weight behind new efforts to significantly improve the speed of the country’s internet connections. On Friday, the browser maker unveiled the Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund, which will shell out $300,000 in grants to software projects that make use of the gigabit fiber services in Chattanooga, Tennessee and Kansas City, Kansas, which can transmit as much as a million bits of information a second. Also backed by the National Science Foundation and a company called US Ignite, the fund will award 10 grants ranging from $5,000 and $30,000, aiming to spark a new breed of web service for use on this new breed of internet connection.