State senators voted 31-0 on Monday to allow Tennessee’s nonprofit electric cooperatives to offer broadband, complete with cable-like video entertainment offerings, to customers living in their service areas.
Republican Gov. Bill Haslam pushed the legislation, dubbed the Broadband Accessibility Act. But the legislation leaves municipal electric systems, including Chattanooga’s EPB with its lightning-fast gigabit service, largely penned up inside their existing service areas.
“This bill as amended does nothing to change that,” said Bell, who handled the bill on the floor, in answer to questions posed by Senate Minority Leader Lee Harris, D-Memphis.
Haslam waded this year into the years-old broadband/video war that has pitted EPB and other muni-electric systems in a legislative battle with for-profit and politically powerful providers including AT&T and Comcast.
The bill originally set a 25-megabit-per-second (Mbps) download requirement and 3 Mbps upload requirement. But that was watered down by an amendment that says the download requirement has to be at least 10 Mbps, with 1 Mbps uploads.