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AT&T Sues Louisville Over Google Fiber (wdrb.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Louisville was one of the cities identified in 2015 as a potential Google fiber location? Since then, Louisville has completed the pre-work Google requires and, most recently, unamiously passed an ordinance to remove legacy bureaucratic speed bumps to installing fiber on existing utility poles. This applies to any telco wanting to add infrastructure, so that's good, right? Well, not according to AT&T. They are suing the city to block this ordinance and prohibit the city from using its infrastructure as it sees fit to provide better broadband to its citizens.
And I'm sure the existing poles are probably already loaded to capacity. Power, telephone, cable already on the poles. Now they're going to add aerial fiber?
Who pays for the replacement poles because of the additional wear and tear?
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
You've got to wonder if the submitter even read the article it links to. That summary is remarkably misleading.
Regardless of what you think about AT&T generally, it's pretty clear they are in the right on this one. The city overstepped its authority.
No. It's ATT making up a story that others will screw up their equipment. It would be exceedingly poor PR for Google to come in and wreck other people's connectivity and get caught doing it. This is ATT being obstructive, not ATT protecting themselves from big bad Google. And yes, sure, in redoing a whole city, some item will get damaged, at some point, but the kind of scenario ATT portrays is silly.
Don't step on the baby.
"âoeGoogle can attach to AT&Tâ(TM)s poles once it enters into AT&Tâ(TM)s standard Commercial Licensing Agreement, as it has in other cities,â the statement said. "
PUC doesn't have authority to tell a municipality who can or cannot connect to a pole. Everyone isentitled to use the poles. Poles are, contrary to AT&T's old conception, not owned by AT they are owned by the town, and a town can and does wield eminent domain to possess property for a public good. Armed with some key funds from Google, Louisville can not only win, but win a landmark decision.
AT&T is overreaching. They are contracted to maintain infrastructure, and the poles are part of it, but AT&T is not going to start ripping up poles unless they want an even worse outcome in the courts. Those poles are owned by the muni, it's just up to the muni to remember that fact.
I'm with AT&T on this. Google is trying to pull an Uber, and claim it's not subject to telecom laws since it's not a telecom. It's leveraging all sorts of goodies--many great benefits to the local citizens and thus desireable perks-- to get the govt to look the other way. But really if AT&T has to follow the regulations and google is providing an analgous service, this is not really a level playing field.
AT&T may be slowing down progress here but they are also getting screwed too. SO take all the utiltiy taxes and regulations off AT&T and let them compete. But the cgovt can't do that. theynot only don't have all the jurisdictional powers to do that, they also need the money they raise from telecom fees and such.
It's a tricky situation in which granting favors to the golden child is not good policy even if its good for progress.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I just retired from nearly 30 years with my local water/sewer utility. No large business is highly efficient, but this one was pretty good as large businesses go; and there was certainly no money wasted on activities actively harmful to customers.
For the first half of my career,I was their IT manager. I could never stop contrasting how the basic water utility worked with how IT providers worked. We painstakingly figured out how much cheaper it was to serve commercial customers that bought water in bulk from residential customers, so that we could work out fair rates for the commercial buyers. Anybody wanting to hook in anywhere could do so for the exact cost of our construction (couldn't even add on a percentage to our costs). Anybody setting up in any registered city lot had to have infrastructure brought to their property line. Everybody got the same rates.
Meanwhile, in IT, anybody who had a networking protocol used it ruthlessly to raise the rates you had to pay to join that network; AppleTalk, Token Ring, DECnet, the works. One thing that "Kids these days" don't appreciate is how one networking protocol that could be provided by many competitors brought down those artificial costs to something like how we work.
Every other form of customer control - intellectual property ownership of, say, Windows or control of parts that could repair Apples - was invariably and instantly used by every player to artificially raise costs for the consumer.
And we had control of *WATER* - life itself - what could we charge if we could back that up with cops charged with destroying any wells anybody dug or confiscating bottled water? Many dollars per gallon, of course; only the well-off could shower daily. You can see why we had to be a public utility like the roads!
On which topic, what if a monopoly provider controlled the public roads? You'd be paying a buck a block to drive them.
When I read stories like this, I want to tear my hair; they all sound so perfectly pointless, struggles over an imaginary problem. Times have changed. "Information Superhighway" was an instant joke, but the analogy between public roads and the Internet is pretty close in terms of it being "what you must use to go to work, go to market, communicate business". It should all be PUBLIC infrastructure, usable to all at the same rates, provided by that ultimately neutral actor, a government bureaucracy where nobody in it makes one dime more or less when it charges more or less. Employees charged only with accounting costs as closely as possible and charging only those, zero profits, with completely open books and responsible to a democratic body.
Then anybody could rent access including any commercial amount of bandwidth, no lawsuits, no tears.
We should re-wire the continent with all-fiber-to-the-home; and the whole lot of it should be owned by local municipalities and utility districts; their stewardship of it regulated by their States, and that regulation overseen by the Feds. From my career, I trust that system, it seems to work with water. I sure as hell don't trust any commercial arrangement I've seen about telecomm; not one I've seen in my whole life. Private actors can't be trusted to use any control of it honestly.
What kind of authority does the city have over widespread infrastructure installed but poorly maintained and documented by utilities?
A utility comes into a city decades ago, gets approval to install infrastructure. Years pass and as their business declines, they reduce the amount of maintenance, documentation and record keeping on this infrastructure. The base is still useful, but is cluttered with abandoned, undocumented and unused components.
The city has a desire to improve services similar to those provided by the utility and believes it is in the best interest of the city and its citizens to repurpose that infrastructure for other similar services, and such repurposing may require a new utility provider to remove legacy components in order to utilize the base infrastructure.
On one hand, you can say AT&T owns the poles and that Google's installers might corrupt the working parts of their infrastructure accidentally and in ways that are hard to fix and may irreparably damage their business relationships.
On the other hand, you can argue that AT&T created any risk through negligent maintenance of their infrastructure, and that their primary purpose is to hinder the expansion of a competing business, either by blocking access outright or creating a burdensome review process for many obviously obsolete component the new utility may remove.
I'm also curious what contractural agreements the city has with AT&T over placement and use of their poles. Is the city contractually obligated to let AT&T do whatever it wants with those poles, forever? Are they never subject to new ordinances, maintenance of the poles and components, etc?