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Tullahoma’s LighTUBe Connects 3,500th Customer
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Tullahoma Utilities Board (TUB) recently celebrated its 3,500th Internet customer, rewarding the lucky LightTUBe subscriber with a $350 bill credit. TUB has offered Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) triple-play services to the Tennessee town of 19,000 since 2009.
LightTUBe now boasts an estimated market penetration rate of 39 percent, despite competition from publicly-traded incumbents Charter, Comcast, and AT&T. LightTUBe delivers $90 per month symmetrical gigabit connectivity (1,000 Megabits per second), so upload and download speeds are equally fast. LightTUBe also offers other affordable options and has repeatedly lowered prices and increased speeds.
Lighting the Way for Tennessee
TUB successfully stimulated economic development with its LightTUBe service, attracting businesses like J2 to Tullahoma. It has also enabled smart metering and other cost-saving measures that are a boon to the local community. Yet, Tennessee state law preempts public utility companies from providing Internet services to communities beyond their electrical grid. With little meaningful competition, neighboring communities have no alternative to incumbent providers.
Although the FCC overruled the State of Tennessee in 2015, both Tennessee and North Carolina are in the process of appealing to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. A recently published study showed that 13 percent of state residents do not have access to broadband services and recommended removing barriers to broadband infrastructure investment. TUB, Bristol’s BTES, and Chattanooga’s EPB are increasingly making the case for overturning the state law in favor of community self-determination.
Congratulations TUB (and customer number 3,500)!
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