Chattanooga seems an unlikely battleground for the future of the American living room, yet it’s one of the few American cities with three choices for the triple-play combo of TV, Internet and phone service.
Since launching their products in the last two years, EPB and AT&T have slugged it out with Comcast, trying to gain the upper hand in a market that has exploded with choices in recent years.
And the challengers are slowly gaining ground.
Comcast revenues in the city of Chattanooga fell by 8.4 percent from January to June this year as EPB signed up new customers for its fiber-optic telecom services and AT&T expanded its U-Verse Internet Protocol TV, according to franchise fees paid by local cable providers.
But while some of Comcast’s customers are defecting, the nation’s biggest cable company remains the dominant TV provider in Chattanooga with taxable revenues this spring four times greater than EPB and nearly 50 times bigger than AT&T’s U-Verse, city records indicate.