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posted by chromas on Friday August 03 2018, @09:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the invest-in-cable-ties dept.

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


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @01:15AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @01:15AM (#717047)

    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.

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