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posted by martyb on Tuesday September 20 2016, @05:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the mama-don't-allow-no-competition-'round-here dept.

TechDirt reports

Wilson, North Carolina's Greenlight [publicly-owned ISP], has had to disconnect one neighboring town or face violating state law. With state leaders tone deaf to the problem of letting incumbent ISPs write such laws, and the FCC flummoxed [by a federal court] in its attempt to help, about 200 home Internet customers in [the town of] Pinetops will thus lose access to gigabit broadband service as of October 28

[...] Greenlight's fiber network provides speeds of 40Mbps to 1Gbps at prices ranging from $40 to $100 a month, service that's unheard of from any of the regional incumbent providers (AT&T, CenturyLink, Time Warner Cable) that lobbied for the protectionist law. Previously, the community of Pinetops only had access to sluggish DSL Service from CenturyLink.

Related:
Muni ISP forced to shut off fiber-to-the-home Internet after court ruling (Ars Technica)

Previous: Appeals Court Rules the FCC Cannot Override State Laws Banning Municipal ISPs


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  • (Score: 2) by unitron on Tuesday September 20 2016, @09:13PM

    by unitron (70) on Tuesday September 20 2016, @09:13PM (#404487) Journal

    "Why doesn't the municipality just form their own company then?"

    Wilson, NC, did that.

    Then the cable companies bribed the state legislators to pass a law to keep any other NC municipalities from doing the same thing.

    So Greenlight, in Wilson, can't serve Pinetops, and Pinetops can't start their own little Greenlight, but Time-Warner Cable can serve both communities out of the same local office and from the same headend if there's enough profit to make it worth their while, which means they get to cherry pick the parts of that service area they want and ignore the rest of it while preventing anyone else from serving it, except maybe the phone company over copper that was probably run the better part of 100 years ago.

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