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
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[...] Google went about announcing locations, and incumbent broadband ISPs, including AT&T, CenturyLink, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable, would quickly counter by promising improved pricing, faster speeds, network upgrades or some combination of the three. A "game of gigs" had erupted. In the end, Google announced plans to build in 34 cities, playing a kind of broadband whack-a-mole game. Incumbents, who initially dismissed the effort as a publicity stunt, accelerated and reprioritized their own deployments city by city as Google announced follow-on expansion.
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FCC Gives Google Fiber and New ISPs Faster Access to Utility Poles
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Friday August 03 2018, @09:52PM
I want the government to fast track things for me, but i obviously don't have enough money or political power (collectively, i have only one vote plus what i can talk my wife, son and daughter into, if i can).
Gotta get me more money, power or votes.
Gonna go see me some Russians (shit! Did my hands just get smaller??? HILLLARY? HILLARY...COME SEE THIS (not my wife's real name))
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @09:59PM (7 children)
I guess. I still remember days past, when we had real competition in our telecoms services. At first in phone service, after the AT&T breakup, then in internet service, because that (slowly) ran on the liberalized phone service.
But because he is in Trump's government, are we going to see partisan finger pointing?
(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!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @01:45AM
When don't we?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Friday August 03 2018, @10:08PM (7 children)
Hey ! How about giving faster access to conduits ?
It would be wonderful if the place didn't look like a third world country, with overloaded poles sensitive to wind, snow, and all kinds of critters.
There are many places in the US served by underground facilities, so it looks like it's not an unknown dark art. Where is Trump's fabled Infrastructure Plan, and does it include mandatory conduit under every road repair yet ?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 03 2018, @10:13PM (3 children)
Feds don't have that kind of authority. All they could do is tie some funding to that condition.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday August 03 2018, @10:24PM (2 children)
Pretty much how it's always done: "Fed will pay XX% if you fit these design criteria. You have the right to refuse and pay the full bill."
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 03 2018, @10:27PM (1 child)
Yup, just clarifying.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @11:04PM
OH YEAH?
Haha Buzzy buzz at it again.
Trying to clarify things. Sheesh, well all I have to say to that is thanks?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday August 03 2018, @10:38PM
The term comes from my having seen a slo-mo movie of a house been flattened as a result of an atomic bomb test.
After speaking with Robert and Tracy today, I emailed them the following to explain why for many years I flatly refused to have anything to do with agency recruiters. That turned out to be a financial catastrophe - but for eight good long years I was able to experience that clean, fresh, restorative feeling that comes from not being sodomized by supersonic telephone poles. [warplife.com]
I'll fix the page's markup Real Soon Now.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday August 03 2018, @10:47PM (1 child)
His actual plan is to let private industry take care of it, then for their investments to be recouped by charging tolls on what are now free-of-charge roads and bridges.
I Am Absolutely Serious.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @12:36PM
Pffft they are already doing this and regretting it. People get pissed that they can't go from A to B via a road because of the tolls. It's supposed to relieve traffic but it's just not working like that. So many people queue up to go around the toll points.
I was driving around tolls in a city finding it very stressful to avoid going down a road for which might charge me or have me fined or arrested (!). In one case I had trouble figuring out how to get out of a suburb down a freeway without paying a toll.
Tolls are evil.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday August 03 2018, @10:34PM (2 children)
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @11:53PM (1 child)
u say dat like is a gud ting
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday August 04 2018, @02:46AM
It originated with some other Kuron's post when I published Living with Schizoaffective Disorder [warplife.com] at Kuro5hin in May of '93.
In Life on a Roller Coaster [warplife.com] I wrote:
To which that other Kuron replied...
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @02:18PM
Strange, the federal government seeing thru established business tactics to drag things out and delay.
That is rare.
(Score: 1) by ankh on Saturday August 04 2018, @04:53PM
Dane, owner of Sonic.net, commented when I reposted this FCC story there:
=======
"... unfortunately the new Federal standards only apply in 30 states. California and 19 others elected to engage in reverse preemption. The access to poles here is governed by the CPUC's 1998 Right of Way (RoW) decision. Under that framework we've had better conditions than the Federal standards, and we do have an effective one-touch make-ready process today. But there are a number of improvements where the new Federal standards have overtaken California's regulatory framework, and we'll be working on our advocacy with the CPUC to encourage updates to the RoW standards here as a result."
=======
Sonic is building out fiber all over our part of California.