Municipal Utility in Tennessee Plans to Offer Fiber Services to Businesses

JOHNSON CITY, TN - The Johnson City Power Board (JCPB) in Johnson City, Tenn., is planning to offer broadband and telephone services to businesses, according to local press reports. The publicly owned utility has excess capacity on the fiber network it recently built to support advanced meter reading and now hopes to make this capacity available to local businesses.

A feasibility study by Kersey Consulting that the utility commissioned examined three possible courses of action for JCPB: becoming a retail provider itself, leasing the extra fiber capacity to another provider or partnering with a third-party operator. Based on the study, the third option - a public-private partnership - appears to be the least risky and most likely to succeed.