Pinetops, North Carolina: The Town That Had Free Gigabit Internet

Pinetops' (NC) fight to get municipal broadband demonstrates how far Big Telecom will go to keep its monopoly. The town was finally getting hooked up to high-speed fiber internet that would deliver 1 gigabit per second speeds to homes and businesses across the rural community. But a series of convoluted laws and court decisions created a scenario in which residents of tiny Pinetops (population: 1,300) received some of the fastest internet in the United States for six months—absolutely free.

For Pinetops, that was municipal broadband, where the local government runs its own ISP and delivers it to paying customers, similar to how electricity utilities work. Their provider: the nearby town of Wilson. Wilson is about 20 miles from Pinetops, just across the county line. The small city (population 50,000) has long supplied nearby towns with utilities like water and electricity, so when Wilson launched its municipally-run fiber optic broadband network called Greenlight in 2008, Pinetops was eager to get hooked up. But just as Wilson was preparing to expand the program in 2011, North Carolina passed House Bill 129: the "Level Playing Field" act, which was supported by Big Telecom lobbyists. This put tight restrictions on any town hoping to start its own municipal broadband, and reined in existing systems under the thinking that it was unfair for the government to compete in the open market with private businesses. After the law was passed, Wilson was not allowed to bring high-speed internet to Pinetops.