ThinkProgress – April 17, 2017
By Lauren C. Williams
Given the choice between giving rural Tennessee residents free faster broadband internet from a government-run program and giving private telecom companies $45 million to build infrastructure for snail-speed access, state legislators chose the latter. …
The Broadband Accessibility Act also excludes government-run internet providers, such as Chattanooga-based electricity company EPB, which has been fighting for years to expand its services to rural Tennesseans. Last year, a federal court upheld the law restricting municipal broadband expansion, invalidating a 2015 FCC vote in EPB’s favor.
“Tennessee will literally be paying AT&T to provide a service 1000 times slower than what Chattanooga could provide without subsidies,” the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s director for community broadband initiatives, Christopher Mitchell, told Motherboard.
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