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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.
So it resorts to the courtroom to try to stop its competitors.
The poles are under the jurisdiction of the state Public Service Commission. In other cities, Google has met with the commission and AT&T, with the end result of Google Fiber using the same poles as AT&T. In this lawsuit, AT&T is saying they want the city council to follow the same procedure followed in other cities where Google Fiber exists currently.
This post is not a defense of AT&T's prior anti-municipal broadband tactics; just playing devil's advocate against a bloody red meat summary.
They don't own right to say what can or can't be installed on those pole's. Public utilities have right of way type access to use those poles to provide service to people, AT&T is just just being AT&T, bunch of (*#&(@*#&.
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.
The US legal code?
A utility shall provide a cable television system or any telecommunications carrier with nondiscriminatory access to any pole, duct, conduit, or right-of-way owned or controlled by it.
Source: U.S. Code > Title 47 > Chapter 5 > Subchapter II > Part I > Section 224
After looking at all the garbage bolted to the side of my house by the various services that have been added over the years before I bought the house, I grabbed some cutters and pulled off everything but the FIOS box and the electric meter. After that I pulled up all the lines out of the ground all the way to the nearest pole.
Was it technically their property when I "seized" it, sure, but if they wanted it so bad maybe they should have come and got it once service was canceled. The shit on the pole is no different. AT&T are just being cunts because 1 they don't want to have pay to go remove unused/outdated gear, and 2 they don't want anyone else doing it because then it will block competitors from moving in.
"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.
Many cities have ordinances about the control of telephone poles. However, many of them also have ordinances that the owners must allow reasonable access to other parties. Sometimes it is for a fee. For example, Comcast should be to use telephone poles installed by AT&T. No part of the ordinance compels AT&T (the owner) to work for Comcast and that's not what the ordinance or removal of such ordinances is about.
I seem to remember a similar case in Austin when Google Fiber started there. AT&T would not grant Google the right to use the poles for any fee. The city intervened and said AT&T has to grant right of use for a reasonable fee or the city might take ownership under eminent domain.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Funny how when AT&T pays for an irrevocable, unlimited, and permanent right to use a city's infrastructure, they get mad when city decides that agreement isn't going so well.
But when customers use "unlimited" internet to its fullest extent, they are thieves and need to be booted off the network via usage caps.
Of course, not; no incumbent telco would ever do such a thing! AT&T just wants to very carefully and deliberately ensure that the equipment is relocated correctly on the poles, and if that delays Google Fiber's rollout for a decade or two, well, that's just the unavoidable price of caution!
(I'm sure the fact that AT&T's "GigaPower" rollout somehow always ends up ahead in the service queue is just a coincidence...)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
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.
My reading of the article on the law suit is that it isn't about who owns the poles. The problem is that the new ordinance has language that allows Google to require AT&T to re-position AT&T equipment on the pole at AT&T's expense. I'm willing to bet that the agreements that Google made with AT&T in other areas required Google to pay at least some of the expense. Which, personally, I think is fair.