John ”Thunder” Thornton is a Chattanooga developer who needed broadband, high-speed internet access to his residential development in the Jasper Mountain area of Marion County. Chattanooga, Tennessee, had some great success bringing the fastest internet to its municipality by created its own broadband service. They were subsequently sued by Comcast because Comcast is a monopoly and not unlike this guy,
“This” guy
feels that squeezing out resources is best done for a profit and with no regard towards the betterment of humanity. They lost all of their lawsuits because all of their lawsuits were lies based in bigger lies, on top of a corporate lawyer sitting on Pinocchio’s nose. Unfortunately, Comcast isn’t the only telecom with monopoly greeds needs and so AT&T launched their corporate hyena squad—and threw around some big money—at and into Chattanooga. Their claims also used the airtight logic of a madman living inside of a Terry Gilliam film. All of this leads us back to land developer John “Thunder” Thornton:
Unable to gain high-speed broadband at what he deemed an affordable price from AT&T or Charter Communications and limited from service extensions from EPB's ultra-fast Internet in Chattanooga, Thornton created his own Internet service provider last year. The private developer spent more than $400,000 to build his own fiber network and link it with a power cooperative in Stevenson, Ala., where fast broadband is available.
Using the fiber optic system that the North Alabama Electric Coop created to help set up a Google data site at the shuttered Widows Creek coal plant, Thornton announced Thursday his Jasper Highlands near Kimball, Tenn., is now able to offer high-speed, gigabit-per-second Internet service for all home sites in his 3,000-acre complex.
He’s calling the place “Gig Mountain.” Thornton tried to support the initiative to expand the municipal created broadband. He lost to the bigger money of the telecoms.
State Sen. Janice Bowling, R-Tullahoma, chief sponsor of the bill to allow municipal broadband service across Tennessee, blamed pressure by AT&T's 27 paid lobbyists in Nashville for killing her proposals.
So here’s some real capitalist, free-market type stuff. The fact of the matter is that these big companies are unable to see beyond their strangleholds. They do not actually innovate anymore because they spend their resources maintaining a monopoly and not creating a better product.
Thornton said when he approached AT&T about providing Gig service to Jasper Highlands he was quoted a price of $1.3 million to serve his mountaintop development — more than three times what it ended up costing Thornton to build his own network connected to Alabama.
"Our costs are much less, but then I don't have to pay for 27 lobbyists in Nashville like AT&T does," Thornton quipped.
Exactly.
