5th Circuit Affirms Pasadena Unlawfully Blocked Crown Castle's Small Cell Deployments

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a late-Friday decision (docket 22-20454), affirmed the district court’s granting of summary judgment for Crown Castle against the city of Pasadena, Texas, and imposing a permanent injunction prohibiting the city’s use of its design manual to prevent Crown Castle’s installation of a small cell, distributed antenna systems network.

The district court correctly found that Section 253 of the Telecommunications Act preempted the city’s small cell node regulations, as they violated the TCA by preventing Crown Castle from providing telecommunications services, said the decision.

The city wrongly maintains that Crown Castle isn’t a telecommunications provider and isn’t subject to the protections of Section 253, said the 5th Circuit. “To the contrary,” Crown Castle is a telecommunications provider under the TCA, it said. The city’s theory that Crown Castle didn’t provide services itself, but merely agreed to install small cell nodes to allow T-Mobile to expand T-Mobile’s telecommunications service, is “untenable,” it said.