Tag Archives: pole attachment

The Challenge of Adding Fiber to Poles

On February 5, the FCC issued a Memorandum and Order related to a pole attachment dispute between Comcast and Appalachian Power Company (APCO). The Order was issued under the authority of section 224 of the Telecommunications Act, which gives the FCC the authority to “regulate the rate, terms, and conditions for pole attachments to provide that such rates, terms , and conditions are just and reasonable”. This order highlights the nuances of regulations that can make it a challenge to build new fiber. This particular case provides a cautionary tale that shows why it can be so hard to get on poles when working with an uncooperative pole owner.

Before discussing the FCC decision, let me review existing FCC pole attachment rules and processes that an ISP must follow to get onto a pole. Just starting the process of getting on a pole requires a well-defined step-by-step paperwork-heavy process that obligates both the pole owner and the attacher to take steps within specified time frames.

  • The ISP must formally request access to a pole. Every pole owner has a unique set of forms needed to make such a request. The request must be detailed and specifically describe the changes that are wanted, and the attacher often includes drawings showing the desired connection.
  • The pole owner then conducts a survey to determine if there are any issues involved in meeting the request. Some pole owners invite the attacher to participate in a physical survey.
  • If the pole owner accepts the request, it must provide an estimate of the ‘make-ready’ costs needed to accommodate the request.
  • If the attacher accepts the estimate, it must pay the make-ready costs upfront, and the make-ready work proceeds.
  • Finally, if the pole owner finds that the actual cost was higher than the estimate, the attacher can request a detailed invoice showing all of the costs.

The dispute in this Order arose over poles that APCO said needed to be replaced in order to accommodate Comcast. Comcast claims that many of the poles had preexisting violations of safety and engineering standards, and because of that, Comcast wanted to pay nothing for APCO to replace the poles. APCO wanted Comcast to pay the full cost of replacing the poles, which would mean that Comcast would be paying to fix problems caused in the past by other attachers.  As an aside, Comcast would be required to pay the full cost to replace a pole that didn’t have any safety violations, as long as the only reason for having to replace a pole is that there isn’t enough room to add the new fiber.

Comcast filed a formal complaint with the West Virginia Public Service Commission in May 2025. The Commission ruled in favor of Comcast and said that APCO unlawfully assigned costs to Comcast and also delayed the pole attachment process. Rather than comply with that decision, APCO appealed the case in July to the FCC’s new Rapid Broadband Assessment Team (RBAT). This was the first FCC case processed under the new RBAT appeal system. The parties entered into mediation, but failed to reach an agreement.

In September, APCO issued new rules across its pole network that require any attacher to pay 100% of the cost for a poles replacement, even when a pole has preexisting violations.  At the end of November, Comcast filed a complaint with the FCC that resulted in this Order. The FCC sided with Comcast and said that its rules had been clear for twenty years that an attacher is only responsible for the incremental cost of moving to a new pole when an existing pole is in violation of safety or engineering standards.

You might read this and view it as a victory for Comcast, but it’s really not. This process delayed Comcast by nine months, and this is one of the faster regulatory resolutions of a pole dispute I can remember. This case shows the challenge that any attacher faces when a pole owner elects not to follow existing pole attachment regulations. In this case, APCO wanted to charge Comcast incorrectly at the time of the application. APCO then ignored an order from the State PUC and took the issue to FCC arbitration, where it failed to come to a mediated agreement. Finally, Comcast had to appeal to the FCC for a resolution.

Most ISPs don’t have the budget or the legal resources to fight an issue like this through this maze of steps. A smaller attacher with a similar situation would likely either have to agree to meet the conditions of the pole owner, and pay far too much for the attachment, or it might instead elect to bury fiber to bypass the poles, also at an increased cost.

Most attachers also worry about getting into formal disputes with pole owners who can retaliate by making it more difficult or costly for other desired attachments. The FCC and States can pass as many rules and regulations as they want, but the pole owner still has the ultimate power to make life costly and miserable for an attacher. I don’t know if any amount of regulations can fix that.

When Government Impedes Fiber Construction

It always perplexes me at a time when solving rural broadband is a top priority that governments still create policies that are huge barriers to fiber construction. I’ve written about a number of such stories over the years.

One of the most perplexing was a county government in Michigan that insisted that a municipal fiber project be built in the deep woods. The pole lines and the county rights-of-way that followed them are now twenty feet into the woods due to sixty years of unchecked forest growth. The county insisted that new fiber be built in the woods in the rights-of-way even though the incumbent telephone company had buried cables in drainage ditches along the side of the road. The bureaucrats at the county wouldn’t budge on the issue and consequently added a lot of unneeded cost to a fiber construction project.

The newest story comes from the State Department of Transportation in New York. The agency has a permitting process that is adding tons of costs to fiber projects – including fiber projects that were funded by State broadband grants. The NYDOT requires an expensive process to get onto a pole located in State rights-of-way. A fiber builder must first request an official copy of the State’s existing mapping for each pole through the FOIL process – New York’s Freedom of Information Law. The process can be slow. For example, if the State intends to charge a fee for the record, the State must write to the ISP to inform it of the fee before proceeding.

Once an ISP has the official documents related to a given pole, it must apply for a permit to use the pole through the PERM75 permitting process. That process requires the fiber overbuilder to survey both the pole and the buried environment under the pole and get that assessment stamped by a professional engineer. This must be done for every pole.

This process adds a lot of time and expense to the permitting process. We know this process is completely unnecessary because nobody else in the country puts ISPs through these steps. In most places, an ISP can turn in bulk requests for a hundred or more poles at a time, all without the need for a professional engineer. Pole attachment work is mostly done by experienced technicians that understand poles because of years of experience – it’s overkill to require a professional engineer to describe if there is room on a pole for a new wire.

It’s hard to understand the state’s reasoning behind this. This new policy was only recently implemented in November 2020, during the height of the pandemic, when it was already clear that the Federal and State governments were going to fund broadband construction to tackle the digital divide. What would make an agency create such a preposterous policy at the same time when the State is pouring money into rural broadband projects?

My guess is that NYDOT is forcing the ISPs to update the state’s poor records on poles and rights-of-ways. That’s something that should instead be required of the pole owners and not of somebody that wants to add fiber to an existing pole that might have been there for sixty years. Requiring a professional engineer to stamp an inventory of each pole is a ridiculous administrative burden that adds costs to a project and ties up engineers at a time when there is a shortage of technical experts across the industry. In my experience, most dumb policies like this come from bureaucrats who are flexing their administrative muscles just because they can.

We hear a lot of crying from the big ISPs yelling about federal overreach with regulations – at a time when the FCC barely regulates broadband at all. But I doubt that many are screaming about this policy because it benefits the big ISPs by making it harder for competitors to build. There is proposed legislation to end the PERM75 practice, but it’s been sitting in committee since July 2021. But this shouldn’t need legislation – this kind of policy should never have been created.

Abandoned Telecom Infrastructure

I saw an article about Merrill, Oregon where the city was wrestling about what to do with an abandoned cable TV network hanging on poles in the City. It’s actually a fairly common occurrence to have abandoned telecom property on poles and I’ve been contacted by a number of cities over the years wondering what how to deal with the situation.

In this particular case the historic cable system in the city was operated by Rapid Communications out of Texas. That company sold cable properties to a number of companies in 2008 and the Merrill system went to Almega Cable Company, which stopped offering service in the City and went out of business in 2011.

There are all sorts of telecom assets that have been abandoned on poles and defunct cable companies are only one example. I saw a lot of WiFi mesh networks abandoned fifteen years ago as operators folded and never retrieved their equipment. There are numerous CLECs that folded in the late 1990s and that walked away from fiber networks on poles.

Having an abandoned set of wires on poles complicates the lives of any other pole users in the market. The unused wires take up space on poles and make it hard for anybody else to add additional wires onto the pole.

Abandoned networks also create havoc for the normal pole attachment process. This process requires buy-in from existing utilities to move or rearrange cables to make room for a new attacher. A new attacher can be paralyzed if they are unable to create the required clearance from existing wires.

In the end I’ve almost always seen the responsibility for getting rid of the network fall to the local government. Somebody has to go through the process of making certain there is no remaining active owner of the network before it can be condemned. Generally the pole owner is not willing to take on that role unless they have a need of their own to add wires to the poles.

Merrill is now undertaking the task of condemning the network. They have to follow law and post public notices to make sure that nobody claims rights to the cables. In the case of a cable company the City not only has to deal with the wires on poles, but also with customer drops and pedestals scattered throughout the community.

Merrill is hoping that some new carrier will want to use the cable network for overlashing fiber. Overlashing is the process of tying the fiber to existing wires and is generally the lowest cost method of fiber construction. But even if they find a taker for the offer my guess is that the new fiber provider is not going to want to assume ownership for the coaxial cables since that would give them liability for any issues or problems with the old wiring. So the City might end up owning the cables in perpetuity. If they don’t find a buyer, the city will have to pay to have the cables removed – although in today’s market there might be enough value in the copper inside the coaxial cables to offset the cost of removal.

We are going to see a lot more abandoned assets on poles in the future. We are just now entering a period when numerous companies are going to want to hang wireless devices of all types on poles. Some of these devices are tiny and I’ve seen others that are the size of a dorm refrigerator. It’s inevitable that some of the wireless deployments will fail, or that the wireless companies will lose the customers served by a given device.

Over time a significant inventory of abandoned wireless devices will likely grow in most cities. And unlike an abandoned cable network, my guess is that it’s often going to be hard to know which wireless devices have been abandoned or even who owns many of them. Cities ought to be considering ordinances today that require the companies that deploy wireless devices to somehow notify them of what they are doing and to also clearly label the ownership of each device.

But there is a movement at the FCC, in Congress and in States legislatures to institute rules for wireless carriers that would override any local rules. Such global rules are going to hinder cities in the coming decades when they try to deal with abandoned assets clogging their pole lines. Most of the proposed new rules I’ve seen don’t address this issue, which will make it messy to deal with later.

The Louisville Pole Attachment Lawsuit

There has been a major legislative push lately to make it easier for wireless companies to get onto poles in order to deploy the small cell sites needed for 5G deployment. AT&T and Verizon have been leading the fight for easier access and there have been attempts at both the federal and state level to enact ‘one-touch’ rules. Proposed legislation not only sets a low price for compensating pole owners, but proposed legislation also removes the ability for pole owners or municipalities to slow down wireless deployments.

There is a lot of debate in the industry about the one-touch issue. As I have discussed in various blogs, issues with getting onto poles is still one of the major roadblocks to many fiber deployments. And from the examples cited by the cellular carriers they are seeing huge delays in deploying urban small cell sites.

Like any debate there are legitimate issues to be considered on both sides of the issues. Proponents of one-touch cite the extraordinary costs of wading through the paperwork-heavy pole attachment process as well as the dollar and cents costs of delaying construction projects.

But on the other side are pole owners and current networks hung on wires. Carriers are legitimately worried about safety issues for their technicians if large boxes the size of refrigerators are hung on poles without constraint. They legitimately worry about how such devices could cause problems during repairs from storm damage. And carriers are also worried about network outages if a new attacher is allowed and able to move their wires without their knowledge or permission.

A court decision a few weeks ago might be a first step into putting some clarity to the issue. In that suit AT&T had sued the City of Louisville in order to stop them from passing a one-touch make-ready ordinance. The ordinance was aimed at making it easier for Google Fiber and other competitive providers to get onto poles in the City. The City of Louisville owns most of the poles in the city and the City has been working with Google Fiber to deploy a fiber network to everybody in the City.

You have to let the irony of AT&T’s lawsuit sink in for a minute. This is a company that is spending millions right now lobbying for one-touch rules. AT&T not only wants to deploy small cell sites, but they are also in the process of building a huge amount of fiber to support those sites. And yet AT&T felt compelled to fight against the very kind of ordinance they are promoting because it would help one of their competitors.

It turns out that not all one-touch ordinances are the same. The ordinances that AT&T and Verizon are pushing are crafted very carefully to help them while still not making it quite so easy for their competitors. The Louisville ordinance made it easier for any new attacher to get onto poles, including AT&T.

The US District Court Judge of Kentucky completely rejected all of AT&T’s claims and tossed the lawsuit. The court basically said that all of AT&T’s claims in the suit were false. It’s ironic that many of the issues raised by the City in defense of the suit sound the same as the claims that AT&T makes elsewhere when lobbying for one-touch legislation.

I’ve always said that being in the regulatory department at AT&T has to be the hardest job in our industry. It’s a company that wears too many hats. AT&T owns a huge monopoly landline network and wants to protect itself from competitors. In some markets AT&T is a major pole owner. AT&T is also a huge wireless company that now wants access to poles. And AT&T is a huge builder of fiber, much of it now outside of its monopoly telco territory.

Any regulatory position the company takes to benefit one of these business lines is likely to not be in the best interest of other parts of the company. When looking at the big picture one has to think that AT&T will get far more benefit than harm from one-touch rules. Such rules will make it a lot easier to build more fiber and to deploy cell sites. And yet, a company with this many tentacles in the industry could not restrain itself from filing a lawsuit that probably was not in its own best long-term interest. The monopoly side of the company felt it could not sit back and let a competitor like Google Fiber build without the company taking steps to slow them down.