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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The Federal Communications Commission today approved new rules that could let Google Fiber and other new Internet service providers gain faster access to utility poles.
The FCC's One Touch Make Ready (OTMR) rules will let companies attach wires to utility poles without waiting for the other users of the pole to move their own wires. Google Fiber says its deployment has stalled in multiple cities because Comcast and AT&T take a long time to get poles ready for new attachers. One Touch Make Ready rules let new attachers make all of the necessary wire adjustments themselves.
Comcast urged the FCC to "reject 'one-touch make-ready' proposals, which inure solely to the benefit of new entrants while unnecessarily risking harm to existing attachers and their customers."
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai rejected this argument, saying that startups are unnecessarily delayed when they have to wait for incumbent ISPs before hanging wires.
But the FCC changes won't solve the problem of slow deployment everywhere. FCC pole-attachment rules apply only to privately owned poles, as opposed to poles owned by municipalities and cooperatives. The FCC rules also don't apply in states that have opted out of the federal regime in order to use their own methods of regulating pole attachments. Twenty states and Washington, DC, have previously opted out of the federal pole-attachment rules, while pole attachments in the other 30 states are governed by FCC rules.
[...] Some local governments had already imposed their own One Touch Make Ready rules, with mixed success. Nashville's OTMR ordinance was thrown out by a court, handing a victory to AT&T and Comcast. But AT&T lost a similar court case against Louisville and Jefferson County in Kentucky.
AT&T said it supported OTMR at the FCC level but asked for limitations that would have slowed the process and made it more expensive, such as a requirement that new attachers pay for engineering analyses when "overlashing" wires. The FCC rejected that suggestion, saying that "utilities may not use advanced notice requirements to impose quasi-application or quasi-pre-approval requirements, such as requiring engineering studies."
Still, the FCC is adopting One Touch Make Ready only for "simple attachments." A shortened version of the old process will apply to attachments that are "complex," meaning they are likely to cause outages or damages. A shortened version of the old process will also apply on the upper parts of a pole, where high-voltage electrical equipment is kept.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RandomFactor on Friday August 03 2018, @10:29PM (5 children)
Forcing a new player to wait 6 weeks per request for a Comcast etc. to get around to taking care of it is simply a death sentence. Everyone knows that. This is absolutely the right call.
We've all heard the stories of entrenched players screwing with the lines of newcomers. I feel for customers inconvenienced in the rare event something does happen, but that's all.
They can feel free to set up a decent coordination method instead of whinging like giant spoiled brats and saying "please kill the competition for our convenience" all the damned time.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday August 03 2018, @10:42PM (2 children)
The Green Site reported that whenever AT&T installs FiOS they cut the local loop off at the pole.
That's just wrong: Local Loop POTS will still work in the event of a natural disaster or national emergency.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @10:57PM
Considering they're no longer battery backed I'd say they're about as useless as VOIP when the power goes down.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @12:34PM
This is what the NBN is doing in Australia even though in many places the copper is still good.
The copper is rotting! We must get rid of it! Complete BS
In other places they are putting copper in. For a fibre network. Go figure.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @01:15AM
Presumably the companies that have those wires will still have the opportunity to handle their own wires, they just won't be able to delay the installation of a competitors wires by procrastinating on moving theirs.
I can only assume that Comcast didn't offer a sufficient bribe to Ajit Pie in order to mess this decision up.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Spamalope on Saturday August 04 2018, @05:01PM
Here in Texas when we had local loop competition for a few years (ILECs - independant lecs - SWBell agreed to allow it in exchange for being able to offer long distance again) the SWBell techs would damage the lines our 3rd party service used, switch us over to known bad pairs and rotate us between known bad pairs if we made a service call. Every. Single. Time. I had to make them show me the levels on the test gear... and suddenly they found they had to fix 'one more thing' as they were busted. (I had a list of all the bad pairs by this time - they'd move our data line to one of the same bad pairs most times they were in the building doing a voice install - nice Huh?) Our SDSL service was 1/10th the cost of SWBells offering. (i.e. similar pricing to other countries vs the Bell monopoly pricing)
SWBell had a solution though. The vast majority of problems were happening with ILEC circuits, so they lobbied the state to end the program to stop all these problems. Why, just euthanize our victim and our abuse will end!