U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said today she thinks Tennessee's approach to providing high-speed Internet and broadband services to rural areas "has worked well in our state" and she reiterated her opposition to having government utilities like EPB expand outside their territories to compete with AT&T, Comcast and other private telecom companies.
Blackburn, the chair of the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, has supported measures to provide $600 million of broadband grants and loans to rural areas, although she voted against one plan with such aid as part of a bigger spending bill. But Blackburn said she opposes granting municipalities and government agencies like the Tennessee Valley Authority the authority to get into the broadband business.
"What we were doing was to make sure that we were not having competition from the government to the private sector and it's a process that has worked out well in our state," Blackburn said today.
Blackburn made her comments during an appearance with U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., at the headquarters of EPB, which has urged the state to allow it to expand its Gig service to all homes and businesses into neighboring communities outside of its service territory.
The Tennessee General Assembly last year approved a measure to provide $45 million in grants and tax credits for broadband expansion over a three-year period. In January, the state gave out the first $10 million in grants to extend broadband connections to about 5,000 households, or only about 1.3 percent of the 366,000 households in Tennessee who lacked access in 2016.
But the Legislature maintained the territorial limit on where municipal utilities may offer telecommunications services.
EPB and other municipal electric utilities in Tennessee such as Bristol Tennessee Essential Services, Tullahoma Utilities Authority and Jackson Energy Authority have offered their own customers broadband service and have offered to extend their fiber optic lines into underserved neighboring areas to expand high-speed Internet, where requested.
AT&T, Comcast and other private telecom companies object to having to compete with government utilities, which don't pay corporate income taxes and enjoy municipally backed borrowing authority.
In 2014, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler urged the FCC to lift state and local restrictions on government agencies and utilities offering broadband and he cited the success of Chattanooga EPB in bringing high-speed internet to its entire service territory. Wheeler noted that Chattanooga was the first city in the Western hemisphere to have citywide gigabit-per-second Internet service because of EPB.
"Chattanooga is both the poster child for the benefits of community broadband networks, and also a prime example of the efforts to restrict them," Wheeler said at the time.
In response to Wheeler's attempt to have the FCC preempt state limits on municipal broadband, Blackburn introduced an amendment in 2014 to bar the FCC from overruling state laws and limits.
"We don't need unelected bureaucrats in Washington telling our sites what they can and can't do with respect to protecting the limited taxpayer dollars and private enterprises," Blackburn said.
The issue that has been fought over at the FCC and the Tennessee Legislature for the past three years has resurfaced in the U.S. Senate election race this fall between Blackburn and her Democratic opponent, former Gov. Phil Bredesen.
Bredesen wants the Tennessee Valley Authority, which helped electrify rural Tennessee in the 1930s, to expand into broadband service to ensure that the entire Tennessee Valley gets high-speed internet access.
TVA is already spending $300 million to upgrade its fiber optic lines along parts of its 16,000 miles of transmission lines. But so far, TVA is prohibited from selling broadband to individual users and has no plans, at this time to do so.
"TVA seems to be the perfect vehicle to do this," Bredesen told Sequachee Valley business and government leaders in Kimball, Tenn., in August when he introduced the idea of TVA providing rural broadband. "TVA's DNA when it was created in the 1930s was to be all about rural development, and TVA is also big enough and has the technical and managerial expertise to pull off a complicated task such as this."
Bredesen said he would favor changing the TVA Act to enable TVA to expand into telecommunications and he even voiced support for providing federal subsidies to ensure more Tennesseans have access to broadband services, which he said are essential for education, commerce and medical care.
But Blackburn said bigger government is not the solution to America's problems.
"We cannot turn broadband expansion over to the government, " Blackburn said earlier this year. "Doing so would create a monopoly and raise taxes, all while drawing the process out."