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Verizon and a union representing its workers have reached a settlement requiring the company to fix thousands of problems in areas of Pennsylvania where it hasn't upgraded its copper network to fiber.
The settlement of the union's complaint "will require the company to repair and replace bad cable, defective equipment, faulty back-up batteries, and to take down 15,000 double telephone poles," the Communications Workers of America (CWA) said Friday.
Double poles occur when "Verizon has failed to move its equipment from an old pole that was replaced with a new one by another utility (e.g., the electric company)," the CWA said. "In many cases, these are dangerous conditions—poles are falling, leaning, rotting, partially cut off, etc."
How many double poles are in the state is not clear. The settlement requires Verizon to fix "at least" 15,000 within three years. There are also "dangling pieces of old poles" resulting from Verizon doing "everything it can to avoid the expense of moving its facilities to a new pole," as shown in the pictures above and detailed in the union's complaint against Verizon.
"When VZPA does nothing, and the electric utility must remove the pole from the base, it may leave the portion of the old pole containing VZPA facilities just dangling over the right of way, tied to the new pole by a single cable or a make-shift wooden support," the union complaint said.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Wednesday June 07 2017, @05:22PM (4 children)
WTF? I'm not in the US, so maybe I just don't understand, but: the FCC? Why would a federal agency be regulating poles in local communities? Seems like that ought to be the job of the local utility commission (or whatever it's called). Keep it local, then the responsible officials are in reach of the local people.
Those dangling pole pieces - insane! Those have got to be heavy, one good windstorm and they're down on a car, a house, or whatever else happens to be below.
But seriously: WTF are the feds doing, regulating local stuff? It's like your "Department of Education" that dictates what kids in local schools get to eat for lunch. That's just federal bureaucrats pissing on local communities because they can.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday June 07 2017, @06:15PM
> Those have got to be heavy, one good windstorm and they're down
That's the point.
Don't fix them on regular budgets, fix them on emergency state/federal funding after a storm.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday June 07 2017, @08:34PM
I'm not an expert on legal history of that topic but the FCC totally regulates the hell our of our broadcasters and the earliest days of cable before cable-only networks were imagined, cable was like a shared antenna system so they somehow fell into regulating that. Think of the "must carry" rules and stuff like that.
Let me know how to install aerial coaxial cable without the involvement of the power company. As a practical matter they have the monopoly and the .gov has been regulating it WRT telecom for ages before cable companies. Before this was set up, there was insanity with power poles, phone poles, and telegraph poles all being separately owned and it was quite a nightmare so its nice to just have power company owned poles. Which ironically in the USA are universally called telephone poles.
Also the FCC is already involved with unintentional radiators like power lines. So interference is already their thing.
With respect to signals being transmitted, there is no "local".
The DoEd thing is different in that for better or worse (mostly the latter) we use the feds to level budgets so the poorest districts aren't that much poorer than the better districts, and if you wanna take our money you gonna buy what we tell you... Note that the DoEd has no input on private schools or schools that don't accept federal funding. Its extortion, sorta. Whereas there's at least some logic behind the idea that the federal COMMUNICATIONS commission would regulate all forms of electronic communications.
States are smaller in the USA that some would think. Inherently its almost unthinkable to not have interstate commerce affect commercial broadcasting in the USA. In Canada I think the smallest province is still 1000 miles wide so its thinkable to "locally" regulate a radio station with 100 mile range, but the USA has states like Rhode Island which I think is about 2 miles on a side, kinda ridiculous, but whatever.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday June 07 2017, @08:35PM (1 child)
Two reasons that actually make some sense:
1. It allows the rules to be consistent across the country. That makes it much easier if, say, an emergency means that a lineman who is used to working in Florida all of a sudden has to come into Vermont to help with repairs.
2. Localities are often underfunded and/or seriously corrupt, and thus unable to spend any resources on relatively obscure areas of regulation.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday June 07 2017, @08:48PM
It would probably end up looking like the NEC where every little podunk village has a law on the books like "our electrical building code will be the NEC with the following stupid and arbitrary modifications" made to pay some local dingbat off or permit some scam. Better off doing it FCC top down style.
Probably, RF standards in general across the board pragmatically have better results with the FCC approach than building code have had with the bottom up NEC approach.