FCC approves C Spire request to give Diamondhead access to Mississippi TV stations instead of making New Orleans primary market for award-winning live streaming TV service

Part of Tech Movement initiative aimed at moving communities forward through technology investment and innovation

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Apr 19, 2019, 12:27 ET

WASHINGTON, April 19, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The Federal Communications Commission approved C Spire's petition Thursday to give residents of Hancock County, Mississippi access to local, in-state television stations, a big boost for the company's award-winning live streaming TV service available through its residential fiber program.

The Federal Communications Commission has approved C Spire’s petition to give residents of Diamondhead, Mississippi access to local, in-state television stations as their primary source of news, weather and sports content, a big boost for the company’s award-winning live streaming TV service available through its residential fiber program. The town's primary market before this week's decision was New Orleans.

Up until now, residents and businesses in Diamondhead and other Hancock County communities who subscribed to cable and satellite TV services were assigned to the New Orleans designated market area (DMA), making it more difficult to watch local news, sports and weather on their preferred stations - WLOX in Biloxi and WXXV in Gulfport.

"In true customer-inspired fashion, we polled our customers, gathered letters from city and county officials and took up the issue with the FCC," said Ashley Phillips, general manager of C Spire Home Services, the unit that manages the company's residential fiber program. "After months of hard work and diligence, the FCC granted the primary TV market modification."

Phillips said the company hopes to begin testing and activating the next-generation residential fiber services, including up to 1,000 Mbps ultra-fast internet access, award-winning live streaming TV and premium digital home phone, as early as next week. Diamondhead is only about 35 miles from Biloxi and Gulfport and nearly 60 miles from New Orleans.

The 8,071-population city is the first on the Mississippi Gulf Coast to receive the 21^st century technology services that promise to transform the way homeowners live, work and play. The 11.7 square miles in the city were divided into 10 fiber hoods covering over 3,500 homes in the resort community after the company began construction earlier this year.

"Residential fiber is a revolutionary technology that promises to boost home values, broaden entertainment opportunities, help expand the local economy and improve the quality of life for everyone," Phillips said, noting that the Diamondhead residential fiber program is leveraging the company's nearly 9,000 route miles of backbone fiber optic infrastructure.

In addition to Gigabit-speed internet, which is available in only a handful of regions across the U.S., C Spire offers Diamondhead residents digital home phone service and the nation's first app-based, live streaming digital commercial TV service, which was honored by the cable TV industry last year as the best television technology product in the U.S.

C Spire TV delivers advanced cable TV features that consumers love in convenient and simple apps that are designed to run on popular streaming devices, such as Amazon Fire TV, Android TV and Apple TV – eliminating the need to outfit every TV in the home with a set top box and saving several hundred dollars a year in rental fees.

With the addition of Diamondhead, C Spire has rolled out ultra-fast Gigabit internet access and related services in 14 Mississippi markets, boosting overall broadband connection speeds in the state by 200 percent since 2014. The suite of services is competitively priced with additional discounts for C Spire wireless customers.

Residential fiber is part of the C Spire Tech Movement initiative, which is committed to moving communities forward through technology with a focus on broadband access, workforce development and innovation.

To learn more about C Spire Fiber or find out if your home is in an area with this next-generation technology infrastructure, visit www.cspire.com/fiber. To learn more about the C Spire Tech Movement, visit www.cspire.com/techmvmt.

About C Spire

C Spire is a diversified telecommunications and technology services company that provides world-class, customer-inspired wireless communications, 1 Gigabit consumer Internet access as well as a full suite of dedicated Internet, wireless, IP Voice, data and cloud services for businesses. This news release and other announcements are available at www.cspire.com/news. For more information about C Spire, visit www.cspire.com or follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/cspire or Twitter at www.twitter.com/cspire.

SOURCE C Spire