Coast mayors will meet soon to discuss the idea of creating a Mississippi Gulf Coast Fiber Ring that would provide Internet access to every home, business and public space at a super-fast 1 gigabit per second, the Sun-Herald reported this week.

The mayors there see ultra-fast broadband Internet service as an economic driver. The idea is to link South Mississippi with fiber optic cable in a circle along Interstate 10 and U.S. 90 and then provide access to each city, which would determine its own service and rates.

Biloxi City Attorney Gerald Blessey said ultra-fast Internet is “Something going on in the great cities of the world that are advancing on ahead of us,” the newspaper reported. Officials in Chattanooga, Tenn., made a public utility out of broadband that “put them on a new platform for the future.”

The technology will draw talented people and high-tech business to the Coast, Blessey said. According to the newspaper there, he sees the technology supporting research at colleges in South Mississippi and providing medical teleconference capabilities that would allow a patient on the Coast to confer with a specialist anywhere in the country. The fiber circle would let movie, television and video game producers work from South Mississippi instead of going to other cities that have the technology, and he said it would help monitor pollution in the Gulf and the health of the fisheries and forestry.

City officials on the Coast are wise to explore this idea. Investing in super-fast Internet is a smart move, but it obviously won’t come cheap. Officials there hope $15 million in BP funds will help jump-start the project.

Brookhaven has explored the possibility of bringing fiber Internet to residents here. So far, the only possibility has been to allow C Spire to install its Fiber to the Home service. But city officials and C Spire couldn’t come to terms so an agreement with the company never got off the ground.

If Brookhaven hopes to compete with other Mississippi cities for jobs and residents, it will have to make investments in the types of infrastructure that attract companies and people. Fiber Internet is one of those.  The city should either reconsider its position on C Spire and get back to the negotiation table or start looking for the millions it will take to build the fiber network itself.