It was a bitter Tuesday for the champions of Fiber-To-The-Premises municipal broadband in Wilson, North Carolina. The city has settled a year-long legal battle with the area's local cable/telco association. The group represents Time Warner Cable, the biggest competitor to Wilson's super fast muni broadband service.

The association demanded the project's confidential business records following its unsuccessful bid for a $19.5 million broadband stimulus grant. After a protracted struggle, the city has released the documents, and this week paid the trade group's attorneys $25,000 in legal fees to boot.

"We have known from the very beginning that, if we built a fiber-optic network, it would basically be a situation where we'll constantly be in court with Time Warner," Wilson's city manager told the Wilson Times. "We're not surprised. I think this won't be the last time we have a court case with Time Warner."

Blazing lawsuits

Wilson is home to one of the more famous success stories of muni broadband, its Greenlight Community Network, which offers pay TV, phone service, and as much as 100Mbps Internet to subscribers (the more typical package goes at 20Mbps).

In comparison, Time Warner's Road Runner plan advertises "blazing speeds" of "up to" 15Mbps. When asked why the cable company didn't offer more competitive throughput rates, its spokesperson told a technology newsletter that TWC didn't think anyone around there wanted faster service.

But in the grand tradition of no-good-deed-goes-unpunished, Time Warner did try to get the North Carolina state legislature to throw Greenlight and similar projects under a bus. The campaign to just plain ban muni broadband in the Tarheel State came in the form of North Carolina Senator David Hoyle's (D-GA) Orwellian sounding bill "An Act to Ensure That A Local Government That Competes with Private Companies in Providing Communication Services Has The Support Of Its Citizens."

The proposed law would have effectively established a moratorium on muni fiber. The bill did permit the Senate's Revenue Laws Study Committee to "study" the concept, presumably until folks forgot about it.

Except lots of North Carolinians didn't. They got their representatives to keep Hoyle's proposed law bouncing back and forth between the House and the Senate. Tattered and torn, when it finally got to the Governor's desk, no strictures on city FTTP could be found. It was the industry's third attempt to block the project, and by July it was dead in the water.

Double standard

Undaunted by this defeat, Time Warner found a new way to put pressure on Greenlight—by opposing its application for a National Telecommunications and Information Agency broadband stimulus grant to beef up its last mile lines. TWC argued the following:

We [TWC] advertise service of speeds above 3Mbps throughout this service area. We pass over 50% of households, and either (1) have actual broadband subscribership of over 40% of the households in these census blocks or (2) the combined broadband subscribership of the wireline broadband providers (including TWC) in these census blocks is reasonably likely to exceed 40%. Therefore, that portion of the proposed funded service area that overlaps Respondent's service area reflected in this response is neither 'unserved' or 'underserved.'

Those latter categories were the baseline for getting an NTIA grant. But nuking Greenlight's stimulus hopes wasn't enough for the North Carolina Cable Telecommunications Association. The trade group demanded that Greenlight fork over its stimulus application.

When the city refused, NCCTA lawyers sued and won in a state Superior Court. Wilson appealed, but saw that the fat lady had sung following a series of additional legal defeats. The municipality surrendered the document.

"We are pleased [that the court] agreed that Wilson's grant application is a public record under North Carolina law," an NCCTA attorney commented to the Wilson Times. "It's a shame our client was forced to file a lawsuit to obtain the application."

The folks over at Community Broadband Networks also think it's a shame, but for different reasons. Forcing Greenlight to turn confidential data over to a competitor could make muni broadband services think twice about asking for federal help.

"This is a particularly interesting juxtaposition," CBN notes, "as privately owned telcos and cablecos regularly argue against having to disclose any information about about their networks as a security concern . In this case, they are on record arguing the same information should be in the public domain."