Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday June 07 2017, @10:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the that-seems-blatantly-unsafe dept.

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.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/verizon-grudgingly-agrees-to-fix-thousands-of-copper-network-problems/

-- submitted from IRC


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday June 07 2017, @08:35PM (1 child)

    by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday June 07 2017, @08:35PM (#522202)

    Why would a federal agency be regulating poles in local communities?

    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.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday June 07 2017, @08:48PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday June 07 2017, @08:48PM (#522209)

    2. Localities are often underfunded and/or seriously corrupt, and thus unable to spend any resources on relatively obscure areas of regulation.

    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.