With Hollywood credits to its name such as Black Swan and Captain America, the film visual effects firm Exodus FX is an unlikely company to exist in Wilson, North Carolina, the 18th largest city in the state, with a population of 50,000.

But that’s where Exodus FX ended up after owner Tina Wallace decided to leave high-cost Los Angeles and move to a cheaper city closer to her family. First, she and her husband moved to West Virginia, where she’s from, but they found it impossible to do business in a place where uploading one short scene of film would take upwards of an hour.

“The Internet situation in West Virginia is pretty dismal,” she remembers. Though she called companies in her service area inquiring about faster speeds, she says it was “a lot of trouble finding anyone that would provide the speeds that we needed, let alone at an affordable cost.” Providers told her there just wasn’t enough demand.

So Wallace decided to move again. She considered places like Kansas City, where Google is installing its gigabit speed fiber service to compete with incumbents like AT&T and Time Warner, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, the first city in America to offer gigabit-per-second broadband speeds as a municipal utility service. Ultimately she settled on Wilson, where the city-owned utility Greenlight has been operating a fiber network since 2008.

Wallace’s story illustrates one of the major economic arguments that smaller cities like Wilson and Chattanooga make when touting the benefits of municipal broadband in places where private companies don’t prioritize or flat out refuse to build high-speed networks. Wilson started its competing service to attract new businesses and revive its flagging economy only after the local providers, Time Warner and CenturyLink, decline to work with the city to improve speeds.

“Every city has a vested interest in this infrastructure. And I think most every city should have a strategy for bringing this infrastructure to their citizens,” says Greenlight’s general manager Will Aycock. “There are many ways to go about it, and the model that’s right for Wilson may not be right somewhere else. But each municipality should be free to pursue whatever option makes sense within the specific confines of their community.”

That freedom is the key point that the cities of Wilson and Chattanooga are now fighting in petitions asking the Federal Communications Commission to preempt state laws that limit the ability of cities to provide publicly owned Internet and cable services.