T-Mobile South v. City of Roswell — does refusing one cell tower count as “regulation”?
A wireless carrier asked a Georgia suburb to approve one cell tower, was refused, and then spent sixteen years arguing over what that refusal means under federal law. The Eleventh Circuit has now read a single word in the governing statute, "regulation," narrowly enough to break with six other federal appeals courts. What follows is a walk through the court's reasoning, not legal advice.
The setup
T-Mobile asked Roswell, Georgia, in February 2010 for permission to build a 108-foot cell tower on a vacant residential lot, and the city denied the permit under a zoning ordinance that scores wireless facilities against nine factors.[1] The dispute is old enough that it has already visited the Supreme Court once, in 2015, on a narrow procedural point about whether a city must put a denial in writing.[3] The substantive fight, over whether the denial was even lawful, is what returned to the Eleventh Circuit this spring.[1]
T-Mobile had sued under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, raising three theories: that the denial lacked substantial evidence, that it left a hole in coverage and so effectively prohibited service, and that it discriminated against T-Mobile relative to other carriers.[1] The trial court applied a judge-made framework called the "significant gap test," found that T-Mobile met it, and after a bench trial entered judgment for the company.[1] Roswell appealed, and the appeals court reviewed the legal questions de novo, meaning it decided them fresh without deferring to the trial court's answers.[1]
The question
The statute bars state or local "regulation" of wireless-facility siting that "prohibit[s] or ha[s] the effect of prohibiting" the provision of service.[2] Everything turned on that one word. Does "regulation" reach a single permit denial aimed at one tower, or does it reach only rules of general application that a locality lays down in advance?[1]
The reasoning, walked
The court began with the dictionary, defining "regulate" as to govern or direct according to rule.[1] A one-off denial, on that reading, declines a particular request but does not govern anything by rule; it is a decision, not a regulation.[1] That distinction did the heavy lifting for the rest of the opinion.
From there the court turned to how the statute is built. A neighboring provision preserves local authority over "decisions" about individual facilities, while the substantive limits use the word "regulation," and still other clauses use "decision" when they impose procedural duties like acting within a reasonable time or explaining a denial in writing.[2] Congress reached for two different words, the court reasoned, and courts should assume it meant two different things.[1] The substantive bar therefore aims at the rulebook, not at any single application of it.[1]
The court found more support in the anti-discrimination clause, which asks whether a locality has treated functionally similar providers differently.[2] Answering that question requires comparing multiple decisions across multiple carriers, which only makes sense if "regulation" describes a pattern rather than one isolated act.[1]
All of this left the significant gap test without a home in the text. That test had required a carrier to prove a real gap in its own coverage and to show that its proposed tower was the least intrusive way to close that gap.[1] The court noted that other circuits had largely assumed the test applied without grounding it in the statute's words, and it pointed approvingly to a 2023 Third Circuit decision that called the test hardly "tethered to the text."[1][4] By rejecting the test for individual denials, the Eleventh Circuit lined up with that Third Circuit view and split from the First, Second, Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, and Ninth Circuits, which had embraced versions of the gap test.[5]
The court did leave one door open. A carrier could still bring an as-applied challenge, a challenge to how a rule operates in practice, by showing a pattern of denials that together function as an unwritten rule against towers, because that pattern would itself be a kind of regulation.[1] A single refusal, standing alone, would not qualify.[1] On that logic the court vacated the judgment for T-Mobile, wiping it out, and remanded, sending the case back to the trial court to be reconsidered under the narrower standard.[1]
What turns on it
The practical effect is a higher bar for carriers inside the Eleventh Circuit. Winning now means attacking a locality's rules directly or assembling evidence of a systemic pattern, rather than persuading a court that one denial left a coverage gap.[1] The disagreement among the circuits is now sharp and squarely about statutory text, which is the kind of split the Supreme Court often steps in to resolve, and these same parties have made that trip before.[3][5]
- Slip opinion — T-Mobile South, LLC v. City of Roswell, Georgia, No. 24-13713 (11th Cir. May 21, 2026) (Pryor, C.J.)
- Governing statute — 47 U.S.C. § 332(c)(7), the Telecommunications Act's limits on local wireless-facility siting authority
- Earlier chapter of the same dispute — T-Mobile South, LLC v. City of Roswell, 574 U.S. 293 (2015), on the written-decision requirement
- Aligned circuit — Cellco Partnership v. White Deer Township Zoning Hearing Bd., 74 F.4th 96 (3d Cir. 2023), calling the significant-gap test untethered to the text
- Context on the split — Congressional Research Service, Congressional Court Watcher: Circuit Splits from May 2026
O'Rourke v. Nationwide — who decides whether a bucket truck was for your “regular use”?
A Verizon technician spent almost all his working hours in a company bucket truck he was not allowed to take home, and when another driver rear-ended him, his own auto insurer refused to cover the injury. The Rhode Island Supreme Court had to settle something oddly foundational, namely who gets to decide whether that truck was for his "regular use," a jury or a judge. This is a summary of the holding, not legal counsel.
The accident and the policy
O'Rourke worked as a maintenance technician and was assigned a single company bucket truck, which he drove essentially all of his working time between a Warwick facility and job sites around the East Bay, loaded with his tools and some personal belongings.[1] He was barred from joyriding in it or taking it home overnight.[1] Another vehicle rear-ended the truck in February 2018 and injured him.[1]
He carried two personal Nationwide policies that included uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage, which pays the policyholder when the at-fault driver has no insurance or too little to cover the harm.[1] Nationwide denied the claim under an exclusion that withdraws coverage for injury suffered while occupying a vehicle "furnished for the regular use" of the insured but not itself insured under that policy.[1]
The narrow issue
O'Rourke sued for a declaratory judgment, a ruling that simply declares the parties' rights under the contract without awarding damages.[1] The narrow issue on appeal was not whether the truck actually was for his regular use, but who is supposed to answer that question: is "regular use" a matter of fact for a jury, or a matter of law for the judge?[1]
How the court got there
The procedural history set up the problem. One judge had denied summary judgment in 2021, calling regular use a factual question, yet at trial in late 2024 a different judge discharged the jury after the plaintiff testified and resolved the exclusion as a matter of law in the insurer's favor.[1] O'Rourke then sought certiorari, a discretionary review in which the state's high court examines only whether the trial court made an error of law, without reweighing the evidence.[1]
The court started with what the exclusion is for. A clause like this one, it explained, is meant to cover casual or occasional driving of other cars, and reading it more broadly would saddle the insurer with far greater risk without any added premium.[1] The design is to stop a policyholder from collecting free coverage on a vehicle he treats as his own but never paid to insure.[1]
Deciding whether a given vehicle crosses that line is governed by the court's own 1972 decision in Ricci, which stated plainly that whether a particular use of a non-owned car is a "regular use" within the meaning of the policy is a question of fact.[1][2] Ricci supplied five signposts for the inquiry: whether the car was available most of the time, whether the driving went beyond occasional use, whether permission was needed or had been granted by blanket authority, what purpose the use served, and whether the car was driven in the area where it would be expected.[1]
The decisive move was to pull apart two things the trial judge had run together. The underlying facts about the truck, what it was used for and how often, were largely undisputed.[1] But applying an elastic phrase like "regular use" to those facts still calls for a judgment about degree, and under Ricci that judgment is the jury's to make rather than the court's.[1] By taking the case away from the jury, the trial justice had treated a factual question as though it were purely legal.[1]
Because the review came up on certiorari, the remedy matched that posture. The court quashed the Superior Court's order, nullifying it, and remanded for a new trial before a jury.[1] Two justices did not take part, and no one dissented.[1]
Why it matters
Stripped to its core, the case is about where inside the court system a decision is permitted to be made. A judge cannot convert a genuinely contested application of a vague term into a pure ruling of law simply because the raw facts are agreed upon.[1] For a reader who thinks in formal systems, the holding reads like a routing rule: open-textured standards get dispatched to the factfinder, and the appeal turned on that allocation rather than on who ought to win in the end.[1]