The issue of putting fiber on poles just got a little more complicated. A U.S. District Court recently overturned a One Touch Make Ready law that had been passed in Nashville, Tennessee to enable easier access to poles by Google Fiber.

The Nashville Metro Council passed the One Touch ordinance last year, and the new law was immediately challenged by AT&T and Comcast, the two large incumbent providers in the area. The law suit is complicated because it looks at two sets of poles – the 20% of the poles in the market owned by AT&T and the 80% of poles owned by Nashville Electric Service (NES), a municipal electric provider.

For the AT&T poles the judge ruled that the law violated federal pole attachment rules. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 gave states the optional authority to regulate poles, but the State of Tennessee never took on that responsibility, so the poles in the state are still subject to FCC pole attachment rules. This differs from an earlier lawsuit in Louisville, Kentucky where that state had preempted FCC pole attachment rules. Here it seems pretty clear that the Metro Council doesn’t have the authority to override FCC rules.

The lawsuit also claimed that the ordinance was in violation of local rules. AT&T claimed that the city charter did not explicitly give the Metro Council the authority to set rules for the NEC poles. The court said that NES had the exclusive right by charter to regulate public rights-of-ways. The court said it agreed with the AT&T allegations but did not make a firm ruling since NES was not a named party in the lawsuit.

The Metro Council originally passed the One Touch ordinance because AT&T and other pole attachers like Comcast were slow-rolling Google Fiber requests to get onto poles. Even today, a few years later, there are thousands of outstanding requests by Google Fiber to get onto poles. The One Touch ordinance would have given Google Fiber the ability to attach to poles and to then handle the paperwork retroactively.

This suit got resolved at a time when the FCC is considering One Touch rules concerning wireless connections. The FCC is thinking about granting the same rights to wireless carriers that this ordinance would have given to Google Fiber and other fiber overbuilders. The FCC recognizes that pole attachments are perhaps the major impediment for the promised coming implementation of 5G networks.

Incumbent pole owners have been able to thwart fiber overbuilders for the last few decades. They can deploy numerous delaying tactics that still fit within the FCC pole attachment guidelines. It’s not clear if the contemplated FCC rules will also make it easier for fiber overbuilders – but my guess is that they won’t. This FCC is clearly favoring the big ISPs and wireless carriers – and so they are likely to grant the rules that the big companies want.

This potential dichotomy between the treatment of wireless attachers and fiber attachers is ironic, because 5G networks are going to require a lot of new fiber. The wireless companies are not going to be building all of the needed new fiber and are hoping for others to build for them. But if those fiber builders encounter the same resistance seen by Google Fiber, then One Touch rules for wireless transmitters will not alone solve the 5G deployment issues.

One of the most interesting aspect of the pole attachment issue is that Verizon and AT&T are two of the largest builders of fiber. These companies scream bloody murder when they encounter the kinds of delays in building fiber that AT&T is causing for Google Fiber in numerous markets around the country. But AT&T clearly wears two hats and they argue for easy pole attachments where they are building fiber and for maintaining barriers to other fiber overbuilders when they own the poles.

None of this is going to be easily solved without Congressional action. There are still going to be states that can preempt federal pole attachment rules if they so choose. And the FCC is going to find themselves unable to overcome the state/federal jurisdictional issue when they try to make a nationwide One Touch rule for 5G. Expect a lot more lawsuits before this gets resolved.