As a resident of Chattanooga, and EPB customer, I wholeheartedly support this move. Some of the things quoted in this article from politicians and ISP spokespeople strike me as laughably outlandish distortions of reality.

I know the folks at EPB quite well, and used to work with them--first as the primary developer in town who built nearly all their online software for nearly 4 years, then as an employee running their internal development department/team. Then again as a vendor when I left the company to consult full-time. They are insanely committed internally to providing the best possible service, speed, and prices they can. They're also serious about providing excellent customer service (more on that in a moment).

Moreover, at least where EPB is concerned, the bullshit posturing of big ISPs alleging these small companies would cherry-pick bigger markets falls completely flat. Come on, now. Isn't that exactly what FiOS did when it chose years ago to stop expanding? Isn't that the primary attitude we see displayed by the big telcos? Have they connected every last mile in America yet, in 2015?

Almost as soon as they'd barely proven the concept of providing insanely fast internet to a few choice, small areas of the city, EPB embarked on blanketing their entire power service area with connectivity. IIRC, it took them a couple years to pull it off--I know roughly because I built the integrated online services customers used to find out if EPB had service at their homes yet, and it was a big deal when we finally got to rip out a bunch of code that handled when the backend services couldn't return a "Yes! We're in your area!". They didn't leave out the poorer areas of the city. They didn't only put it where the highest populations are. They were installing connectivity at an incredible pace--so much so, that there was actually a bit of a local stir when some residents started raising a fuss over not asking for the connectivity and having it installed in their neighborhoods (and having the upgraded power boxes installed on their houses (at no charge) that also housed the fiber-ready connections should they decide to become a customer). There's only one place they failed to be able to offer service that, afaik, may still remain to this day--MDUs[1] that have contracts with Comcast.

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A brief(ish) anecdote on the dedication a small municipal company has to providing top-notch customer service:

I was sitting in a meeting one day with two of the senior VPs and one VP of engineering, who reported directly to the President. We were waiting for others to join for whatever we were actually supposed to be discussing, and the VPs were discussing a host of troubles they had when they send field techs out to customer's home for installation, upgrade, and troubleshooting jobs. At the time, whenever the techs were on location and had to have something handled by the tech ops center--this is a smart grid, so they could just flip switches and make shit happen once they knew what a problem was--they had to call into a customer service line that went to tech support to get the situation resolved. That means all the techs are calling in throughout the day just like customers would call in, so they wind up spending a lot of time on hold. They were estimating it was at least a 15-minute wait at each site. Bemoaning the lack of any easy way to fix it, and the lack of any off-the-shelf third-party software they could contract in to help solve it, they expressed feeling stuck. As a customer, I'd experienced this very problem a couple of times myself. I had a great team of devs who worked for me, and they were itching for a problem to solve. So, I spoke up. I asked if it was true that all the techs had laptops in their trucks. It was. I asked if they were all connected to the network via VPN. They were. I then gave them a quick 5-minute pitch right out of my ass, saying that my team had just completed what we were doing, and we could build and launch an app on the intranet that would allow the techs to go to their trucks, answer about 3 questions telling customer's acct, the problem, and their phone number, and submit a help request. Then we'd make that pop up in real-time on tech support's displays, and anyone in tech support could immediately call the tech back as they were flipping switches and pressing buttons to verify the problem was corrected. There were some surprised and questioning looks shot back at me across the table--I was new, they didn't know me, and they definitely didn't expect me to speak up, I think. One of them, seasoned veteran of the company's many forays into having custom software built for them, said they'd looked into some things like that before and it would take months to complete something like that. When he asked how long we'd need, I told them to give us a week. The looks turned into comical disbelief--they were new to having a dedicated internal team of developers, and my department was brand new, full of devs and a designer I'd hand-picked. There was all the usual "there's no way you can do this," and my typical over-confident assurances we could.

It took us 10 days and one meeting halfway through to get all the requirements and launch the app. By the end of the first month, our little project had taken in a bit over 2,000 real-time support tickets, and we'd cut average wait time at customer's homes from a rough estimate of 25 minutes down to an exactly timed 12 minutes from ticket open to ticket closed. The VPs called us all into a room at the end of the month. They were beaming. My team felt like badasses. They were showered with praise. The VPs said they couldn't believe it, and couldn't argue with the results. Next thing on the agenda? "We've got about 5 more departments we want to roll this out to right now and get everyone doing this stuff in real-time. We can kill all the time customers are waiting on us in so many ways with this."

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All that to say that a small, municipal telecom has some characteristics and features the likes of Comcast don't--a personal stake in the local community, a desire to take care of the local community because it's themselves, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to make their community better. I don't think Comcast gives two shits about any of its customer areas. EPB, on the other hand, not only provides a service at crazy speed and fair prices, but they continue to invest time, money, guidance, and other resources into all kinds of things that matter to the local community--all the gig business stuff, tech councils, etc. Their internal corporate structure tends in a number of ways toward stupid political bullshit, like any other company (it's why my whole team and I eventually stopped being employees, and went back to being vendors). But it doesn't get too much or too often in the way of everyone at the company trying to constantly find any and every feasible way to make their services better than the big ISPs, take care of their customers better because they are family and friends, and take pride in finding more ways to play a part in making Chattanooga a better place[2].

[1]: multi-dwelling units, aka apartment complexes

[2]: I'm feeling really weird about this being probably one of the few times I've ever extended such effusive praise toward CHA.