A small Texas ISP has filed a lawsuit against Comcast, alleging that the cable giant destroyed the company's lines after it refused to be acquired by the company. The lawsuit, filed last week in a Harris County, Texas court (hat tip: Consumerist), states that Comcast approached the owner of Telecom Cable LLC in 2013, offering to acquire the company's networks and 2,500 customers, located west of Houston.
But after talks extended throughout 2014, "ultimately, Comcast was not willing to pay what Telecom’s operations were worth, and the negotiations ended," the lawsuit claims.
Shortly after rejecting Comcast's advances, things got ugly, the company says.
Comcast decided that instead of buying the small company, they'd overbuild the area, deploying their own lines to these customers. Telecom Cable says the company marked its underground cables with orange flags and spray paint, and sent a map of its network infrastructure to Comcast -- to ensure its subcontractors didn't accidentally damage Telecom's equipment and cables.
But Comcast's workers began disconnecting all of the company's customers, the lawsuit claims, causing a massive wave of disruption that the smaller ISP couldn't keep up with.
"Within six weeks, Defendants destroyed or damaged the lines servicing every single Telecom customer in Weston Lakes," reads the complaint, "and not one of those lines was ever repaired by Defendants."
Telecom Cable says the company needed to use 4,000 feet of cable to repair the damage done by the Comcast contractors. But by the summer of 2015 the company was effectively forced out of business in the impacted area, since the majority of the small ISP's customers had disconnected service out of frustration with the outages. The "vast majority" of those customers are now Comcast subscribers, claims the complaint.
Comcast has yet to comment on the lawsuit.