Why CUB doesn’t have a fiber broadband network
Recently Clinton City Council member Jim McBride explained why Clinton Utilities Board doesn’t have its own fiber network for broadband internet.
McBride acknowledged that people might like that service and it might have benefits.
“Let’s cut to the chase,” he said. “Everyone’s tired of calling Comcast and Xfinity and would like some competition.”
He said it comes down to a 2002 agreement CUB made with Xfinity. Xfinity provided CUB with fiber cables for it to use for its own purposes, including help during outages and automatic meter readers. The catch was that CUB agreed not to compete on broadband.
Knoxville Utilities Board, however, installed its own fiber cables.
“The KUBs of the world are putting fiber in for the electric side of things, for their own benefit,” McBride said.
“As a collateral damage of that, there’s extra fiber, and so that’s what they’re using and running to people’s houses, and that’s the benefit of that,” he said, contrasting CUB with KUB.
If CUB were to break the contract with Xfinity, it would need to put in its own fiber.
And that task, McBride said, can be tricky, requiring specific distances from other lines on the same poles.
He also said the service will need to turn a profit, something that has been a problem in some communities.
He also said that the website Broadband.com lists Anderson County as already having 100% high-speed internet coverage, just that some of it is from satellites or from T-Mobile cell towers.