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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.
If so, the Louisville City Council should damn well be able to cite the authority that allows them to tell AT&T to put Google equipment on AT&T's poles.
So it resorts to the courtroom to try to stop its competitors.
It would seem like AT&T are moaning about other contractors, like Google, removing AT&T equipment. This is nothing about trying to prevent Google from hooking up fiber. They kind of have a point as well. Who decides when something is legacy, needs retiring and removal? Sure, I hate AT&T as much as the next guy, I enjoy my ridiculously high speed fiber and feel sorry for those who don't have it. But at least read the article.
This is typical corporate philosophy. they know they can't compete with Google's resources or technology, so they try to block them. It won't really work of course, but they figure they can slow them down until they figure something. Maybe an alliance with Verizon...
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
In the real world, their ain't much "Free" in most "Free market" capitalism.
Film at eleven.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
AT&T thought it was fine and dandy when the city passed the ordinance that placed an easement on people's property, so that AT&T could use the land for utility poles and subterranean lines. They could always repeal the whole easement and give them the minimum time required by law to remove the equipment if AT&T keeps pressing the issue further.
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.
All of Louisville needs to BOYCOTT AT&T, and then same goes for other cities and CableCo's that pull this $#!+....
Why is Louisville City Council legislating about the poles?
That is a job of the Warsaw government!
90% of fiber is aerial. It costs 2-4 times as much per mile to bury it, so that's usually only done in urban areas, along railroads, and in areas prone to hurricanes and other extreme weather.
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"ATT says they will suffer "irreparable harm". They want us to imagine Google will shut down the whole city and blame ATT for it. That would be irreparable. In the real world, those much more minor things that WILL happen are entirely able to be repaired.
"Unless the Court declares the Ordinance invalid and permanently enjoins
Louisville Metro from enforcing it, AT&T will suffer irreparable harm that cannot be redressed
by recovery of damages. For example, AT&T will be forced to comply with a preempted
ordinance, will be improperly subjected to regulators at multiple levels of government, and will
suffer a loss of customer goodwill. A permanent injunction will advance the public interest as
defined by Congress and the FCC."
Buncha lies.
Don't step on the baby.
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.
I can't speak for this case in particular but in many cases the poles ARE owned by AT&T or some other private entity. They might be owned by a third party like the power company. In fact it's kind of uncommon for the poles to actually be owned by the local municipality. There are laws governing use and access to the poles but they may very well be privately owned. For example the poles outside my house are owned by the local power company. The phone and cable companies pay the power company to utilize them. If the pole gets damaged it is the power company's responsibility to fix the pole. The local government does not and never has owned the poles near me.
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.