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Judge Dismisses AT&T's Attempt To Stall Google Fiber Construction In Louisville (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T has lost a court case in which it tried to stall construction by Google Fiber in Louisville, Kentucky. AT&T sued the local government in Louisville and Jefferson County in February 2016 to stop a One Touch Make Ready Ordinance designed to give Google Fiber and other new ISPs quicker access to utility poles. But yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge David Hale dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice, saying AT&T's claims that the ordinance is invalid are false. "We are currently reviewing the decision and our next steps," AT&T said when contacted by Ars today. One Touch Make Ready rules let ISPs make all of the necessary wire adjustments on utility poles themselves instead of having to wait for other providers like AT&T to send work crews to move their own wires. Without One Touch Make Ready rules, the pole attachment process can cause delays of months before new ISPs can install service to homes. Google Fiber has continued construction in Louisville despite the lawsuit and staff cuts that affected deployments in other cities.
While AT&T focused on building out fiber in profitable areas, Google started with the poorest most neediest and less served areas. Take care of people and people will take care of you.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
The mess of cables you see in asian cities, is why many asian cities can offer you gigabit fibre to your home at a very cheap price.
If you have a single cable on which anyone can lease bandwidth, who's going to build and operate the single cable? If it's a for-profit company then they will have a monopoly and increase the prices however they want, or just stop leasing the raw bandwidth and try to sell you bundled services, again at high prices and tying you in to all kinds of other crap you dont want, all while providing poor lowest-common-denominator service.
You need non profit or government to provide the cable, which some cities have been *trying* to do, but which keeps getting stalled or outright blocked in court by the incumbent telcos.
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During the 1990s before the RBOC's gamed the system by running fiber-to-the-node, they were required by law to give equal access to CLEC's to straight copper runs. At different points in time I had Sprint's ION service as well as various DSL's from Speakeasy/Covad. The law was intended to push the RBOC's to hasten FTTP roll-outs, but the loophole cost us, the citizens, all that competition that had actually sprouted up. At one time I even lived directly behind the CO for my area, and they could have run ethernet from their building to my apartment, but instead ran it as fiber around the block to a terminal, and then copper from there. I had to fight with AT&T (then SBC, after they bought up Ameritech which used to be IL Bell) to get a straight copper run so I could still use Speakeasy instead of AT&T's crappy adsl service. And now where I live we're on a fiber run of several km to the node in the neighborhood, so I can only get service via AT&T. And yet AT&T won't provide me even their old crappy adsl service here because... well they'll never give me the actual reason - others have service here and the linemen have confirmed to me that there's ports in the terminal that could be used.