The US telecoms giants have called on the FCC to block the big cities’ plans to expand high-speed Internet services. Verizon, AT&T and other telecoms giants want the FCC to block expansion of high-speed internet networks – one of the victims resides in Tennessee, and the other in North Carolina.

USTelecom, representing the tech giants, claimed that the success of public broadband is a mixed record, with many examples of failures. Given that state taxpayers are on the financial hook when a municipal broadband network goes under, state legislatures should be cautious in limiting or blocking that activity.

For example, Chattanooga in Tennessee has the largest high-speed Internet service in the country: its customers have access to speeds of 1 gigabit per second – this is 50 times faster than the average across the United States. The municipally owned EPB offers service, which has sparked a tech boom in the area and attracted worldwide attention. The company is now petitioning the FCC to expand its territory. It is also known that Comcast and other companies have sued EPB trying to prevent it from fibre optic roll out, but lost.

Wilson in North Carolina is a town of only 49,000 people. It had to launch Greenlight, its own service that offered high-speed Internet, because residents complained about the cost and quality of Time Warner cable’s service. The latter lobbied the North Carolina senate to outlaw the service and prevent similar municipal efforts.

Now the tech giants claim that the FCC has no legal standing over the proposed expansions and can’t preempt the North Carolina and Tennessee statutes which would prevent them. They explain that states have adopted a wide range of legislative approaches on how much authority they provide to local governments to operate their own broadband networks. Some of them require an election or public hearings before launching a public project, others ask for competitive bids. Still, others restrict the terms of service making the public entities bear the same regulatory burdens as private ones. The coalition also claims that states are within their rights to impose such restrictions, taking into consideration the potential impact on taxpayers in the case that public projects aren’t carefully weighed against private investment.

Back in January 2014, the FCC issued the so-called “Gigabit City Challenge”, calling on providers to offer gigabit service in at least one community in each state by next year. The move came amid intense lobbying from telecoms giants to stop municipal and other rivals including Google from building and expanding high speed networks.

In response, EPB claimed that communities should be given the right to decide on their broadband futures at the local level. It pointed out that while the private sector failed to serve everyone, public power companies made sure everyone had access to that critical infrastructure.