Jake Varn of Pew authored a report based on a deep dive into the impact of pole attachments on broadband expansion. The report highlights how issues with pole attachments are adding extra costs to the many grant projects being funded like BEAD and the Capital Project Fund.

The report highlights what anybody who has been building networks has known for many years. The process of adding fiber to the pole can be horrendously complex and time consuming. The rules on how to get onto poles differ significantly by State, but also by pole owner. 23 states and Washington D.C. manage the pole attachment process while the rest of the states follow rules established by the FCC.

Every step in the pole attachment process can be expensive and time-consuming. Applications to attach fiber to a pole often must be done on a pole-by-pole basis since neighboring poles can be significantly different. Many pole owners have no good inventory of poles and must send somebody out to look at each pole to compare to what’s being requested in an application. All of the costs of this process are ultimately borne by the ISP making the application.

The real issues arise when there is not enough room to add a new fiber that will meet national standards for clearance with other wires. In many cases, there’s no room because parties that added wires in the past did not follow standards when placing their wires, and the pole owners never made sure it was done right. The new attacher must pay to fix these old errors.

The most expensive pole attachments come when a pole is too old or too full of wires to add a new fiber, in which case the pole must be replaced. The applicant is saddled with the entire cost of replacing the pole, although a federal order last year tried to soften that impact. But the real damage from having to replace poles is the time required, which differs by State and pole owner.

As the report highlights, the process to do the make-ready work just to get ready for fiber construction can take a long time, which isn’t compatible with the construction deadlines required by the many grant programs. There are already examples of ISPs who have returned RDOF and other grant awards once they realized that the poles were in worst case than they thought, or the learned the pole owner was not going to be cooperative.

The Pew report made some great recommendations, which are aimed at states and federal policymakers and pole owners:

• The process would be speeded up if there was a requirement to create an electronic inventory of the basic data about every pole – how old, how tall, how many existing attachments? Some pole owners have done this, and it really eases the process.
• Pew recommends that states standardize the application and permitting process to eliminate the maze of different paperwork and processes needed. A single broadband project might include poles on city, county, and state roads, with each jurisdiction requiring a different paperwork process and forms.
• Pew recommends that governments form rapid response teams to resolve disputes or delays in the pole attachment process.
• Pew recommends that States consider pole replacement funds to replace bad poles. They also recommend that states take advantage of any disaster relief funding to replace poles damaged by storms or other disasters.

There is still time for State and local governments to act on these recommendations – but they need to act now to ease the process of ISPs trying to bring better broadband to rural areas.

In full disclosure, I provided some input to this report.