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Frontier Teams With AT&T To Block Google Fiber Access To Utility Poles (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Ars Technica: Frontier submitted a court filing last week supporting ATT's efforts to sue local governments in Louisville and Jefferson County, Kentucky to stop a new ordinance designed to give Google Fiber and similar companies access to utility poles. They're concerned the ordinances will spread to other states. Frontier's filing said, "the issues raised by the case may have important implications for Frontier's business and may impact the development of law in jurisdictions throughout the country where Frontier operates." The ordinance in Louisville lets companies like Google Fiber install wires even if ATT doesn't respond to requests or rejects requests to attach lines. Companies don't have to notify ATT when they want to move ATT's wires to make room for their own wires, assuming the work won't cause customer outages. ATT claims that the ordinance lets competitors "seize ATT's property." Frontier is urging the court to consider the nationwide implications of upholding Louisville's ordinance, saying Louisville's rule "is unprecedented" because "it drastically expands the rights of third parties to use privately owned utility poles, giving non-owners unfettered access to [a] utility's property without the [...] utility in some cases even having knowledge that such third-party intrusion on its facilities is occurring." Frontier said companies should be required to negotiation access with the owners if they didn't pay to install the utility poles. They urged the court to deny Louisville Metro's motion to dismiss ATT's complaint.
We don't want Google fiber competing with us and providing cheap internet that is 50x faster. What, do you expect us to actually invest in upgrading ourselves, and even funnier, lowering our prices?
That sounds like a great model to go to... IF Frontier and AT&T then also have to "negotiate access" with all the property owners of the land their poles are on!
Pick an aphorism: Goose/gander, pot/kettle, glass houses, "be careful what you wish for," and all that...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
...to move to a public utility model for telecom. Government owns and maintains the right-of-way and the copper/glass. Everybody who wants to gets to buy access to it, be it last mile or peerage
No. Please spare us the tired, "the guvamint will screw it up" argument. It's bullshit. I can show you public utility districts that make their commercial counterparts in the electrical service delivery business look like third-world pretenders. It works as well as it does for one simple reason, the district is beholden to the electorate, not shareholders.
That sounds bizarre. Are there property titles attached to utility poles like there are for houses?
Funny when imminent domain happens to a company they file massive lawsuits, when it happens to citizens they get buried under red tape.
Happened over 10 years ago in Lafayette, LA. But it was a City vs AT&T and Cable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
In most districts I've seen the utility companies don't pay any kind of excise tax or ownership tax on "their" poles. Since they're already getting special treatment as these poles are seen as supporting a public utility, they shouldn't be too surprised to see some strings getting attached to this special treatment.
Require the "owning" company to move connections, etc., in a reasonable amount of time after being notified. If the connections aren't moved within the legally mandated time, then "ownership" of the pole is transferred to the requesting company. That would prevent the "we don't have time" or "we're going to ignore you" or the other kinds of slimy activities that the owning company would perform in order to handicap their competitor.
Frontier said companies should be required to negotiation access with the owners if they didn't pay to install the utility poles.
Should Siemens or I be required to negotiate with AT&T so that I can connect a Siemens phone to the line AT&T ran to my home? We've been down this road. Yes, the phone companies paid to install the utility poles and lines. Yes, they did it partly with public funds and partly with privates revenues they took in as a government granted monopoly. Part of the deal was supposed to be that access be universal. Court rulings and legislation have already established that ILECs have to provide access to competitors. How is this any different?
The closest pole to me is on my property, and I'm not even an AT&T customer any more. Shouldn't the same public interest laws that they depend on to stick those ugly poles on the property that we pay for, right in the very front, also apply to others? We sure don't need AT&T and the power company and Google and the local cable company and everyone else who wants to to stick their own ugly creosote soaked poles on our property, which would seem to be the alternative unless AT&T is somehow more privileged than the others.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I was forced to use Frontier service for a couple of years. I used their DSL service.
I got 2 or three "cease and desist" letters during this time for exceeding 100GB in a month.
This was in the 2009-2010 range. Even then 100GB was not hard at all to hit.
I also gave up trying to ever get any service from them, their tech support was terrible / non-existent. I was having some trouble getting the router that THEY provided me into a bridging mode so that I could use my own firewall. They kept telling me that it was impossible, that "their side" didn't support it.
After a bit of tinkering on my own, I did get their pos router into a bridging mode.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
I'll just leave this Libertarian solution here.
C|N>K
I hate ugly poles, but I loves muh teevee.
"The ordinance in Louisville lets companies like Google Fiber install wires even if ATT doesn't respond to requests or rejects requests to attach lines."
I'd be interested to see how many of these requests AT&T has explicitly approved, because I imagine the only reason this ordinance was even proposed in the first place is because they rarely (if ever) are.
The same type of thing is happening in San Jose. Comcast and AT&T are working hard to keep Google Fiber out of the Bay Area in California, by denying access to utility poles. I called the Northern California Joint Pole Association (NCJPA) myself to ask them some questions, and they were somewhat flummoxed on the phone. I guess it never occurred to them that helping monopolists protect their turf might tick off the local population.
Nothing more clearly demarcates the beginning of a corporation's death than the switch of motivation from growing the business by competing to instead protecting the established business from competition.
Easy really.
Which giant company are we supposed to be cheerleading for? And why? This is a minor procedural dispute over which forms company A has to fill out when it deals with equipment installed by company F and company T. Someone will decide and those forms will get filled out and the wires will get installed, regardless of the cheerleading.
I signed on to Frontier DSL service with the representative insisting that I would get 6Mb service despite my many attempts to get her to qualify that as a max possible speed, and tell me what I should actually expect. She wouldn't hear any of it, 6Mb is what I was getting...
It's been a fairly reliable 1.5Mb max for the past 2 years, never more, at $30/mo.
I've got a "30Mb" service offer for $10-15/mo more from Country Cablevision that I may have to try out since Frontier seems to want more than it provides....
If any of you are tired of watching the corporations run our government please consider adding your name to this cause: http://www.movetoamend.org/
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
Frontier bought and paid for the pole.
A competitor wants use it, but needs to coordinate with Frontier to use it.
Frontier does not like this, so drags their feet.
The public says that having a separate pole for every utility is not acceptable, so Frontier has to share.
The sharing rules give Frontier a chance to do the work themselves, or if this is too slow, let a contractor from a list they provide to the work with consultation from their engineering.
Frontier is challenging the sharing rules in court.
Well, the pole is Frontier's, but the place on which it sits is likely public space which is not to be squandered with a bunch of poles.
I would not bet that they will get much from this except a bit more time.
Towns and cities have the absolute right to let "third parties use your poles" because your poles exist in the public right-of-ways like along roads, sidewalks, and the municipalities grant you easements over people's property, because they see poles as a public good.
This business of using the public for your private profit and then whining about it when you have to abide by rules made by the public, is poor judgement at best. It's whining. The briefs themselves are subterfuge because they ignore the right of the public to regulate pole use.
So stop lying, Frontier and AT&T and get with the fucking program and let competition on "your" (ours, really) poles.
Dipshits.
--
BMO
Frontier and AT&T are half right: no one should be allowed to tamper with the existing attachments without notifying the company who owns those wires and giving them reasonable opportunity to act. That way lies chaos and disruption.
They're dead wrong about the "negotiate access" thing though. Those utility poles are in public right of ways. The public has a right to use them under common carriage rules whether their "owners" like it or not. If the utilities don't like it, the localities can and should take them over for public use same as the roads.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
AT&T doesn't own any of the land that the poles are on. These local governments should threaten to use imminent domain to reclaim the poles and then lease them back to AT&T and anyone else who wants to use them. Basically, force AT&T to play nice or make them pay for the privilege of their monopoly.
A similar situation is playing out in the very sparsely populated area where I live: Centurylink has decided that it's not profitable to service my area so, they refuse to do any new DSL installations. Large expensive homes are built only to find that, at best, they are stuck on satellite internet and, at worst, will have no internet connection at all (cell phones don't work here so, that's not an option). Homes that Centurylink has previously serviced are being sold to new owners only to find out that Centurylink won't *re-install* an internet connection for the new owners. Since Centurylink owns all the poles and refuses to service the area anymore, the situation will never improve unless the local government intervenes.
The problem is that the local governments are either clueless or corrupt (frequently both I would imagine). My neighbor is literally the state senator for my area and when I've brought up the issue with him (in person), he considers it to be so low priority that he gives me some meaningless platitude and changes the subject. I don't think he's necessarily in the pocket of Centurylink, I think he just doesn't understand/believe what I'm telling him. He's from the "business can do no wrong" generation so, some nerd half his age must be either over reacting or just plain wrong.
It's amazing to see our infrastructure stagnate and crumble because the previous generation has sold us out to the highest bidder and doesn't see anything wrong with that.
In Canada, the utility poles are on mostly-public land, and the stringing of lines to new places is subsidized by tax dollars, so all taxpayers are part-owners of the poles anyway. In some cases the poles are on private land and the landowner doesn't get compensation, so the utility is stealing resources as well (blocking that piece of land from it's owner's use). Perhaps rules are different there, I don't see that they have any exclusive private-access rights when others have paid them to put the poles up in the first place...
This is the kind of thing that we need eminent domain for. They should either lease the space or lose ownership. I hope the voters are watching this, and are ready to pounce if the politicians and courts fall down.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Funny, I just read Comcast has the opposite complaint. A local power utility was about to rip down Comcast's lines for failing to pay their pole attachment fees, "which would have killed service for about 7,000 Comcast customers."
âoeUnfortunately, the utility has been unwilling to compromise and has billed Comcast for arbitrary pole rates that are nearly three times the national average,â said Horwitz. Comcast claimed [the power company is] using their position as a monopoly to gouge customers with high rates.
If the cognitive dissonance of that last quote doesn't make your head explode, it's a good read:
http://stopthecap.com/2016/06/...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
This type of bullshit is exactly what imminent domain is for. It's time for an exercise of that power.
If they claim they own the utility poles, then they might own property taxes to the municipalities. Land owners also might demand rent for all the lines over private property. The city could also charge them rent/fee for using public easements and public rights of way.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Hopefully it won't be unconstitutional.
AT&T is a dinosaur that can stuff it.
I was an AT&T customer for 15 years..I use Google Fi now and couldn't be happier.
AT&T "promised" to roll out fiber statewide over a decade ago as part of their deal to merge back with Belllsouth. Needless to say, we never got our fiber and now these assholes at AT&T have the audacity to suit someone who finally wants to give us what they refused to provide? Fuck AT&T!
As a side-note to this discussion, it should be pointed out that access to poles should be regulated to some degree if for no other reason than to prevent overloading the weight-capacity of the poles. Poles do not have unlimited weight-bearing capacity.
--Disclaimer: I work for a big telco--
We have sometimes had to re-route our fiber builds because electric-utility-owned poles had reached their capacity. (a very expensive proposition sometimes)
If all carriers were allowed to add cables to a poles without thought to total load, years down the road, say, during an ice storm, you might find a neighborhood up the proverbial creek minus the oars. Loss of a pole includes electricity service.
Look closely at a pole that has a lot of cabling on it: almost all of it is under tension. In various directions. Get too much load then throw in a wrench (car hitting pole, wind storm, ice storm), and you lose both telecom service and electricity.
I'm no fan of regulation, but it had a root of common sense in the beginning.
Fuck AT&T! What a goddawful company. I have to admit, their technology is slightly above average (which is not saying much per telecom conglomerates these days), but their billing gimmicks and annoying caffeinated telemarketers are steaming multi-colored piles of Zika-infected-maggot-filled moldy horse shit.
They NEED competition sooooo badly, it hurts.
Table-ized A.I.
Sure fiber on polls threatens other inferior internet solutions. That is why it is mandatory - it is a much better solution to internet access. That it threatens company's business models that offer inferior solutions is irrelevant. Either they offer equally as good solutions or they lose business to the better competitor. That is how a free market should work and how a meritocracy works.
the city and state does not charge for right of way and att hasn't put up a pole in years the power company and att seldom maintains there line installations what is att losing there god given right to mooch.
There is nothing remotely legal about AT&T's and Frontier's position or arguments. Their lawyers should be disbarred -- or at minimum, held in contempt -- for wasting the court's time and money. Breaking the bad news about your client's wishful thinking is part of the job. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Cowards.
well if their going to block access to the Poles unfair..
well,, put an ACL (or something similiar) in place that "nul route's" AT&T's public IP blocks..
As I understand it, under the EULA Google has the right to refuse service to any one for pretty much any reason.. UNfair business practices I think would be an actionable item.
moving past that, Since business/individuals use gmail for legit reasons,, allow access to that aspect of the service..
just for say, a couple of days.. Not to long..
just enough to persuade someone to come back to the table for further discussions..
no future in your frontin.
ATT is known US government wiretapper
Google is known US government total surveillance across PC's and small devices both in OS and over network
Playing like they are opposed when the common link is the US Government...
no future in your front here.
Then I say: HEY! Get your freak'n pole out of my yard then! You made the local gov give YOU access to my yard edge. So, let more competition in or get your pole OUT of my yard! Eminent do-fucking-main!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.