Tag Archives: make ready

Pew Report on Pole Attachments

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.

Grant Bottlenecks

Cardinal News, a newspaper for Southwest and southside Virginia recently published an article that says that as many as two-thirds of the State broadband grants awarded in 2022 have fallen behind schedule.

The reasons for the delays in the Virginia grant projects are familiar to every ISP who has built a new network. The primary issue in Virginia has been the make-ready process for poles. This is work that must be done to make poles ready to accept a new fiber. Some poles require no make-ready, some require a rearrangement of existing wires, and many unfortunately require replacing an existing pole.

Some of the projects were delayed due to the paperwork needed before the physical make-ready process could begin. This includes getting pole attachment agreements in place and having engineers decide on the make-ready work needed for each pole. Once that process is complete, there are rules that dictate the make-ready timeline.

Virginia has elected to remain under FCC jurisdiction and rules for pole issues, but the State passed a law in July specifically intended to speed up make-ready work. But frankly, any rules or laws about pole access are nearly meaningless in places like the Appalachian regions of southern Virginia, where poles run through heavily wooded areas. It takes longer to tackle this work in rural, hilly areas on windy roads. It’s not going to help that some of the projects in southwestern Virginia now had to deal with damages from Hurricane Helene.

The reason I wrote the bog was not to highlight the Virginia issues, because it sounds like the State is on top of the issues and that the projects will likely get completed before hitting the end of 2026 when the federal funding for these projects expires. Virginia is also ahead of most other states in that the State set aside additional funding to help keep broadband projects on track. The reason for the blog was to highlight the likely delays that are going to happen when BEAD grants hit the ground.

It was originally thought that States would be on significantly different schedules for BEAD. However, the NTIA implemented a 365-day shot clock that requires States to make grant awards within a year after getting approval of a State’s Volume II BEAD rules. This means that within a six to nine month window, all BEAD grant projects are going to get rolling at the same time.

I’ve always anticipated that there will be bottlenecks created by the large volume of BEAD grants, but having all of the grants launched within a narrow time window will aggrevate the issue. Consider a big electric company like Duke Energy that operates in multiple states in the Southeast. The company is going to be asked to deal with a lot of BEAD projects at the same time. All of the regulatory rules in the world are not going to help the inevitable bottleneck that a large utility will face in 2025 when multiple ISPs and projects try to get a response from the legal teams and engineers at a utility at the same time. Most States are going to throw extra money at trying to overcome the make-ready bottlenecks as Virginia has done.

Make-ready is only one of the issues that is going to cause delays. I’ve written before about the issues involved in permitting, acquiring rights-of-way and easements, and locating underground utilities that can all bog down fiber projects before they even get started.

Most State Broadband Offices have already indicated that they are going to pressure ISPs to sign contracts to complete projects in two, three, or four years, depending on the size of a project. ISPs will likely have to agree to these timelines, even when they know that delays may make it impossible to meet such a promise.

The good news is there is a longer time frame until BEAD dollars expire, but I fully expect in a few years to see more articles like the one in the Cardinal News wondering why it’s taking so long to build the promised broadband networks.

Will BEAD Encounter Bottlenecks?

A question I’m often asked is if a big flurry of BEAD grants will encounter any big bottlenecks that will slow down the implementation of grant construction. My response is yes, but maybe not the bottlenecks most people expect.

Before trying to answer the question, we should put BEAD grants into perspective. These grants will bring north of $50 billion in spending to the industry between 2025 and 2029. While that is huge, we can’t forget that there is currently a huge amount of fiber construction going on from the many other broadband grant programs. We also are seeing a continued burst of fiber construction from large telcos converting copper to fiber and fiber overbuilders staking out new markets. BEAD is not going to create the giant blip you might imagine.

But there will be bottlenecks that affect BEAD, and I expect some of the following:

  • Engineering and Design. BEAD means a lot of miles of fiber to design in 2025 into 2026. I’m guessing this could easily result in a 50% increase in demand for the folks who design networks.
  • Environmental Studies. Many BEAD studies will require environmental studies. This is something that is not done for most other fiber construction. I predict a bottleneck for environmental scientists, particularly when BEAD project first get started in 2025 and 2026.
  • Locators. I expect there will be more aerial than buried fiber built with BEAD, but there will still be a substantial need for buried locators. The shortage is mostly going to come from construction in rural counties that don’t have the resources available to handle a big increase in workload.
  • Pole Make-Ready. A lot of people have been yelling warnings about this. The biggest bottlenecks will be from pole-owners that get swamped with huge numbers of requests to get onto poles. Many of these utilities have never seen large numbers of connection requests before. There are regulatory rules that say the process has to be speedy, but that’s not going to matter when the pole owner can’t handle the volume.
  • Permitting and Rights-of-ways. Local governments will be asked to issue a huge number of permits for construction. The problem is going to be similar to the bottleneck with locators in that a lot of this construction will be in rural counties that often have little or no staff. ISPs that are already building in rural counties have been saying that this is an unexpected and sometimes major delay.
  • Fiber Contractors. I believe all BEAD projects will find a construction contractor. The delays will come from contractors trying to keep technicians. The Powers and Communications Contractors Association (PCCA) recently warned the industry that there is a current shortage of 28,000 experienced construction technicians. That shortage will likely by contractors having a hard time keeping staff who are lured away for higher pay. We’ve always seen this in times of big construction demand.
  • Fiber Materials. Vendors have had a long time to get ready for BEAD. But there will still be delays when a huge percentage of these projects want to buy materials within a relatively short time window. I also worry that some of the manufacturers who made a big splash out of opening a U.S. factory will have problems supplying everybody with BABA-compliant hardware.

I do not expect most of these delays to be crippling, and we won’t be returning to the delays we saw during the pandemic when projects shut down for lack of critical staff or materials. The bottlenecks will not affect all projects but will be regional and almost always unexpected. But delays will slow construction at times, and that means extra cost for anybody building a network.

Bottlenecks for BEAD Construction

It’s now clear that State Broadband Offices are going to put a lot of pressure on BEAD winners to spend grant awards and build networks as quickly as possible. ISPs generally have the same goal, because getting customers quickly is the best way to make sure an ISP can pay for the network.

However, there are numerous reasons why BEAD fiber construction might be delayed. Companies building in the northern U.S. must contend with a short construction season that makes it hard to build in the winter. While the whole industry has been gearing up to support BEAD projects, there still might be supply chain bottlenecks that pop up to plague some projects when there is a sudden flood of BEAD projects.  Some projects are going to get bogged down in environmental studies – particularly if the firms that do this kind of work are also swamped by the number of BEAD projects.

There are a few other major and predictable bottlenecks that will delay a lot of BEAD projects. For all construction, a possible major bottleneck is permitting. For aerial fiber construction, there will be delays due to make-ready issues on poles. For buried projects, there will be delays due to locating existing utilities.

Permitting. Contractors must obtain permits to engage in any construction. Since BEAD will largely be constructed in rural areas, the expected problems will come from county governments that are not ready to process permits that could cover a huge portion of the geography in a county. Counties might also be simultaneously dealing with projects funded by the FCC’s RDOF program, the FCC’s EACAM program, ReConnect grants, State broadband grants, and ARPA-funded grants. A lot of rural county’s have only a handful of employees and are not prepared for an onslaught of permitting requests.

Make-Ready. Make-ready is an industry term used to describe any work that must be done first to enable adding fiber to a pole. The effort required with make-ready can range from fairly simple work like trimming back tree branches that would interfere with the construction to the complex effort required to replace poles that can’t accommodate an additional fiber.

The process of putting fiber onto poles is highly regulated, and various States either have their own pole regulations or follow the FCC rules. Pole rules generally set a shot clock on how long a pole owner has to respond to a request to get onto poles and then complete any needed make-ready work. But for various reasons this process doesn’t always go smoothly, and there is a litany of things that can slow down the process. Some pole owners cooperate in the process while others quietly resist. Notably, State and federal pole rules don’t apply to poles owned by cooperatives and municipalities. Some poles are owned jointly by an electric utility and a telephone company and require that both parties buy off on requested changes. Pole replacement usually brings in the existing utilities that have wires on a pole – some of which will be competing with the new ISP. I could make a pages long list of specific ways that getting the make-ready work done could cause delays.

Locating. It’s mandatory that somebody locates existing buried utilities and other underground obstructions before somebody tries to bury new fiber. This is both a safety precaution (because hitting a gas or electric line can be deadly) and an attempt to minimize damage to existing underground utilities. It’s likely that you’ve seen evidence of a locate when you see spray painted lines and perhaps a message on streets like shown at the top of this blog.

Locates are not handled the same way everywhere. In some places, each existing utility locates its own infrastructure. In other jurisdiction the local government locates. In some places the locate work has been handed off to a third-party locator that ocates for every utility. The delays from locates are going to materialize when the folks who do the locates are going to be swamped by the sheer volume of miles of roads that must be examined due to BEAD.

Solutions. The NTIA recognized these roadblocks early and encouraged states to develop rules to expedite these processes, at least for the BEAD grant process. Some states have done so to some degree and have done things like tackling updated pole attachment rules. But it’s fairly obvious that most states have done nothing. In many cases the only solution is more money. For example, counties might need to hire additional locators or permitting staff to be ready for the increased workload.

It’s still not too late for states and counties to tackle these issues. I predict that the heaviest BEAD construction is going to be in 2026, meaning these pre-construction issues will hit in 2025. A lot of states have said that getting broadband to rural areas is a high priority – but if they don’t look at these key issues, then state and local governments will be part of the problem instead of the solution.

Replacing Poles

When folks ask me for an estimate of the cost of building aerial fiber, I always say that the cost is dependent upon the amount of required make-ready needed. Make-ready is well-named – it’s any work that must be done on poles to be ready to string the new fiber.

One of the most expensive aspects of make-ready comes from having to replace existing poles. Poles need to be replaced before adding a new fiber line for several reasons:

  • The original pole is too short, and there is not space to add another wire without upgrading to a taller pole. National electric standards require specific distances between different wires for technician safety when working on a pole.
  • It’s possible that the new wire will add enough expected wind resistance during storms that the existing pole is not strong enough to take on an additional wire.
  • One of the most common reasons for replacing poles is that the poles are worn out and won’t last much longer. That’s what the rest of the blog discusses.

Poles don’t last forever. The average wooden utility pole has an expected life of 45 to 50 years. This can differ by the locality, with poles lasting longer in the desert where there are no storms and having a shorter life in more challenging environments. It’s easy to think of poles as being strong and hard to damage, but the forces of nature can create a lot of stress on a pole. The biggest stress on most poles comes from the cumulative effect of heavy winds or ice pulling on the wires and attachments.

There are a lot of reasons why poles fails:

  • Although most poles are usually made of rot-resistant wood, the protection eventually wears off, and poles can decay. This can be made worse if vegetation has been allowed to grow onto a pole.
  • Using a pole differently than the way it was designed is common. A pole might have been rated to carry utility wires but over time got loaded with extra attachments like electric transformers, streetlights, or cellular electronics.
  • The soil around the base of a pole can change over the decades. The area may now be subject to flooding and erosion that wasn’t anticipated when the pole was built.
  • Somebody might have removed a guide wire that was supporting the pole and not replaced it.
  • A pole may have been hit by a car, but not badly enough to be replaced.

ISPs complain when saddled with the full cost of pole replacement. Many of the issues described above should more rightfully be borne by the pole owner. But the federal and most state make-ready rules put the entire cost burden of a pole replacement on the new attacher. It is clearly not fair to make a new attacher pay the full cost to replace a pole that was already in less than ideal condition.

It may seem to the general public that poles are just stuck into the ground. But if you’ve ever watched a new pole being placed, you’ll know that the process can be complex. The design of any new pole must account for all of the anticipated stresses the pole will have to endure. This includes the weight of the wires in a windstorm, ice accumulation, soil composition, the quality of neighboring poles, the spacing between poles (the greater the spacing, the more weight and wind resistance), and if the pole is standalone or to be guyed (anchored to the ground with several strong supporting cables).

Most engineers estimate that a generic aerial construction project will require replacing around 10% of the poles. It’s a pleasant surprise when the percentage is smaller but it can be a real sticker shock if a lot of poles must be replaced. I’ve seen projects where an electric company has neglected maintenance and most of the poles were inadequate.

The right question to ask is not how much it costs to build a mile of fiber. The better question to ask is how good are the poles?

Was That Fiber Construction?

One way that I know that there is a lot of fiber construction occurring is that many of the people I talk to tell me that they’ve seen fiber construction in their neighborhood. I always ask about the type of construction they are seeing, and many folks can’t define it. I thought today I’d talk briefly about the primary methods of fiber construction.

Aerial Fiber. The aerial fiber construction process starts with steps most folks don’t recognize as being fiber-related. Technicians will use cherry pickers or climb poles for make-ready work that prepares the poles to accept new fiber. There might even be some poles replaced, but most people wouldn’t associate that with fiber construction. The construction process of hanging the fiber can be hard to distinguish from the process of adding wires for other utilities. There are generally some cherry pickers and a vehicle involved that holds a reel of fiber wire. The aerial construction process can move quickly after the poles have been properly prepared, and many folks won’t even realize that fiber has been added along their street.

Trenching. Trenching fiber is the best-named construction method because it exactly describes the construction process. With trenching, a construction crew will open a ditch with a backhoe and lay conduit or fiber into the open hole. Trenching is usually chosen in two circumstances. First, it is often the least expensive way to bury conduit along stretches of a road that don’t have impediments like driveways. When a contractor builds fiber in a whole city, trenching might be used along streets that have not yet been developed and that don’t yet have sidewalks. Trenching is usually the preferred construction method when putting fiber into a new subdivision – the ditches are excavated, and conduit is placed before the streets are paved.

Plowing. Cable plowing is a construction method that uses a heavy vehicle called a cable plow to directly bury fiber into the ground as the plow drives along the right-of-way. Fiber plowing is done almost exclusively when burying fiber cable along a route where the fiber will be placed in unpaved rights-of-way, such as along a country road. The right-of-way must be open and not wooded to allow access to the cable plow.

A cable plow is an unmistakable piece of equipment. It’s a bulldozer-sized vehicle that holds a large spool of fiber. It’s unmistakable to see a cable plow because folks will inevitably wonder what the contraption is moving along a country road. But the plowing work can proceed quickly, and the more noticeable crews are the ones boring underneath driveways and intersections along the plowing construction route.

Boring. Also called horizontal boring, trenchless digging, or directional drilling, this is a construction method that uses drills to push or pull rods horizontally underground to create a temporary hole large enough to accommodate a conduit. This is the technique used to place fiber under paved streets, driveways, and sidewalks.

Boring rigs come in a variety of sizes based on the length of the expected drill path. Small boring rigs might be mounted on the back of a truck. Large boring rigs are standalone heavy equipment that are often mounted on treads (like a tank) instead of wheels to accommodate a wide variety of terrain. It’s fairly easy to identify a fiber boring operation because there will be vehicles of all sorts around the area and usually large reels of brightly colored conduit nearby. The chances are that if you see fiber construction in a town, it is using boring.

Microtrenching. This construction process is unmistakable. A heavy piece of equipment that contains a giant saw cuts a narrow trench in the street. The saw is usually followed by trucks that haul away the removed street materials. The cutting process is loud and draws everybody’s attention. Microtrenching can be finished in a day in ideal circumstances where the hole is cut, side connections are made with a high-pressure water drill to get fiber under the streets and sidewalks, and the narrow trench is refilled and capped.

Predicting Financial Success

I’m often asked to provide a rule-of-thumb metric to predict the financial success of a broadband business plan. The two most commonly requested metrics are customer density (how many households are needed per mile of road) or the percentage of customers needed (penetration rate) to make a fiber business plan work.

After having done hundreds of feasibility studies I’ve stopped boiling success down to any simple metric – it’s never that simple. The reality is that there are a number of important variables that have a major impact on operating a successful broadband business plan. Every ISP and every market is different, and one or two variables can have a huge positive or negative impact on a given business plan.

Following are the major variables that can make a difference when building fiber. A similar list can be made for deploying fixed wireless or other technologies.

  • Customer penetration rate. An area with low density might still have great financial results if the penetration rates are high enough. I’ve seen expected penetration rates vary from 40% in some large markets to over 90% in markets with no existing broadband. Changing the expected penetration just a few percentage points can have a big impact on cash flow. This is why we think it’s mandatory to do a survey to understand customer interest in fiber broadband.
  • Labor rates. The cost of staffing varies widely across the country and between companies. and there are places where labor costs twice as much as in other parts of the country. Labor costs also include taxes and benefits which vary widely by state and between ISPs. The staffing structure of the ISP also comes into play since companies vary between lean and staff heavy.
  • Borrowing costs. The interest rates and the term of a loan (15-years versus 25-years) can have a huge impact on a fiber project since the size of the borrowing is usually significant. Things that mitigate borrowing costs such using some equity, getting grants, etc. can have a big positive impact.
  • Prices. Broadband prices can have a big impact. We know that most customers will buy the lowest priced broadband that has a reasonable speed. There is a big difference if this primary product is at $50 versus $60.
  • Cost of the Network. The metric I’m often asked about is the minimum number of households needed per road mile. While customer density is an important factor, there are many other issues that can have a big impact. The cost of building fiber varies widely across the country due to some of the following:
    • The mix of aerial and buried fiber has a giant impact.
    • For buried fiber, the type of soil matters, because the presence of rock adds big costs.
    • Again labor rates, meaning the cost of construction crews. We’ve also seen projects that took federal money that had to pay prevailing wages for rural construction that killed the project.
    • The condition of the poles and the effort and cost needed for make-ready can be a huge factor.
    • The difference between building in the power space versus the communications space on poles can be significant.
    • Choosing PON versus active Ethernet can have a difference, with Active E having larger fiber bundles needing more splicing.
    • One of the biggest impacts is the cost of fiber drops – the two important factors are 1) average distance customers are from the road, and 2) who builds the drops (we’ve seen the labor costs for drops vary by several hundred percent).
    • Building in phases versus building as quickly as possible can sometimes make a big difference.
    • Customer density is important, but the above factors can matter a lot more. Density can also be a tricky number. Consider two examples of companies that would have the same average density but significantly different costs: Company A has no towns and the rural areas average 10 households per road mile. Company B includes one decent sized town but is surrounded by big farms but still averages 10 households per road mile.

Clients always want me to predict the outcome of a business plan before we undertake the needed business models. I’ve learned to not predict. I’ve worked on projects that look to be far more profitable than I would have expected and looked at others that don’t look feasible for some reason. As an example, I recently finished a business plan model where it turns out that the existing poles in the new market were nearly unusable and the alternative of going underground was impractical because of rock. This one factor made it hard to justify building fiber in a market that otherwise would have passed the sniff test using high-level metrics.

The Broadband Battle in Nashville

PoleThere is a regulatory battle going on in Nashville that is the poster child for the difficulty of building new fiber networks in urban areas. The battle involves Google Fiber, AT&T, Comcast, and the Metro Council and Mayor of Nashville, all fighting over access to poles.

Google Fiber wants to come to Nashville and needs access to existing poles. About 80% of the current poles are owned by the city-owned Nashville Electric Service with the other 20% belonging to AT&T.

The Metro Council recently enacted a new ordinance called the One Touch Make Ready (OTMR) law. This law would speed up the process called make-ready, which is the process for making room for a new wire to be hung on poles. Under the new rules, Google Fiber or other new pole attachers would be free to move wires belonging to another utility to make room for their new wires. And the new attacher must pay for the needed changes, at whatever rate the other wire owners bill them.

The FCC took a stab at this problem a few years ago and they allow a new attacher to add their cables to a pole without approval if the paperwork process takes too long. But those rules only apply to poles that don’t need any make-ready work – and in an urban area most poles need some amount of make-ready work to make room for a new wire.

Current make-ready rules require that the owner of each existing wire be notified so that they can move their own wire, as needed. As you might imagine, this means an overbuilder must issue  a separate request for multiple wire owners for each individual pole that needs to be modified, including detailed instruction the changes that must be made. Other pole owners are giving an opportunity to disagree with the recommended changes. And this whole paperwork process can’t even begin until the pole owner has first inspected each pole and decided on a make-ready solution.

As you can easily imagine, since many of the other companies with wires on poles don’t want competition from Google Fiber or any other new competitor, they do everything legally possible to delay this process.

What I find ironic about this process is that the current wire owners can drag their feet even if their own existing wires are in violation of code. The various industry codes dictate a specified distance between different kinds of wires in order to make it safe for a technician to work on the wires, particularly during bad weather. I’ve found that most poles in an urban area have at least one existing code violation.

It’s also ironic that the cable company can drag their feet in this process. I’ve heard numerous stories about how the installers for the original cable networks often went rogue and installed their wires without getting formal permission from the pole owners. At that time the telcos and cable companies were not competitors and so nobody made a big fuss about this.

It’s been reported that one City Council member tried to stop the new law from going into effect by introducing an alternate proposal – which supposedly was written by AT&T. That alternative law gave the incumbents 45 days to make changes, but also limited the fast pole response to 125 poles per week. In a City the size of Nashville there are tens of thousands, and possibly even more than 100,000 poles that might need to be changed – and so that limit basically means that it would take many years, even possibly decades for a new fiber provider to build a city-wide network.

The new One Touch rule would allow Google Fiber or others to make the necessary changes to poles if the incumbent wire owners don’t act quickly enough to move their wires. AT&T has already sued the City to block the new ordinance. They argue that the City has no authority to order this for the AT&T-owned poles. They also argue that this change will disrupt their service and put their customers out of business. The lawsuit is, of course, another delaying tactic, even should the City prevail.

There is little way to predict how the courts might decide on this. It’s a messy topic involving a complex set of existing and technical industry practices. Both sides have some valid concerns and good arguments to make to a court. Both sides also have access to the best lawyers and it will be an interesting court fight. But perhaps the most important thing to consider is that the existing rules can mean that it’s not economically feasible to build a new fiber network in a City – if so then something needs to change.

Who Controls Access to Poles?

telephone cablesAT&T has sued the City of Louisville, KY over a recent ordinance that amends the rules about providing access to poles to a carrier that wants to build fiber. Louisville is hoping to attract Google or some other fiber overbuilder to the city.

But there has been no announcement that any such deal is in place. It seems the city is trying to make it more attractive for a fiber overbuilder to come to the city and so they passed an ordinance that allows a new fiber builder relatively fast access to poles. The ordinance gives a new fiber builder the right to rearrange or relocate existing wires on poles if the other wire owners on the poles don’t act to do so within 30 days.

AT&T opposes the measure, and their court case says, “The Ordinance thus purports to permit a third party… to temporarily seize AT&T’s property, and to alter or relocate AT&T’s property, without AT&T’s consent and, in most circumstances, without prior notice to AT&T.” They argue that a new attacher will cause service outages and create other problems with their network.

The real issue at hand in the case is if a City has the right to make rules concerning poles. Today there are basic pole rules issued by the FCC that lays forth the fact that a competitive telecom provider must be given access to existing poles, ducts and conduits. Such rights were provided by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. In reading the FCC rules you might think that a new attacher already has the rights that are being granted by Louisville. The FCC rules allow a new attacher to go ahead and put their wires on poles if the pole owners don’t act quickly enough to process the needed paperwork to allow this.

But the rub comes in when there is not a clear space on an existing pole. There are FCC and national electrical standards that require that there be certain spacing between different kinds of cables on poles, mostly to protect the safety of those that have to work in that space. If you’ve ever looked up at poles much you’ll notice that it’s not unusual for the distances between the different utilities to vary widely from pole to pole, meaning that whoever hung the cables was not paying a lot of attention to the spacing.

In the industry, when there is not enough of a gap to accommodate a new attacher, the existing wire owners have to move their wires to create the needed space. If there is not enough space after such a rearrangement then a new taller pole must be erected and the wires all moved to the new pole. The new attacher is on the hook for all rearrangement costs. This process is called ‘make ready’ work and is one of the major costs of getting onto poles in busy urban environments.

The FCC has granted states the right to make additional rules concerning pole attachments, and many states have done so. This lawsuit asks if a city has the same right to make pole attachment rules as is granted to the states – and so this is basically a jurisdiction issue. It’s the kind of issue that probably is going to have to eventually go to the Supreme Court if the loser of this first suit doesn’t like the court’s answer.

To put all of this into perspective, pole issues have often been one of the biggest problems for new telecom providers. Back in the late 1990s I had one client that wanted to get on about 10,000 poles and was told by the local electric company that they were only willing to process paperwork for about a hundred poles per week. I had another client back in that same time frame that was told by a rural electric company that they just didn’t have the time to process any pole attachment requests.

And as you can imagine, when getting on poles bogs down, a new fiber project also bogs down. This can be extremely costly for the company making the expansion because they will have already begun spending the money to build the new network and they will have a pressing need to start generating revenues to pay for it.

Across the country the conditions of poles vary widely. In some cities the poles are relatively short and they are crammed full of wires. In other cities the poles are taller and do not require much make ready work for a new attacher. But when the poles are not ready for a new attacher this can be a costly and time-consuming process. It’s going to be interesting to see if the courts allow a city to get involved in this issue in the same way that states can.