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.

Comments

good

[Osgeld]

Fuck you ma bell and whatever name cable conglomerate, we want the ability to choose some one else, and unfortunately the small guys cant do it and it takes something like google to pry open that tiny little crack

Maybe once there is realistic competition the rather heavy price we pay for frankly shit service will correct itself

Re:good

[Tailhook]

single fiber cable

I think I prefer the lots of cables spaghetti approach. Redundancy is a thing; it has real value. Also, it's a lot harder for big brother to put a microscope on multiple alternative services their inevitable churn.

If there is only one cable and alternatives can't emerge then there will always be some rent seeker with control over it, and that rent seeker will eventually find some rationalization for jacking up rates and getting owned by some big vertical interest that wants monetize is harder. The magical competition fairy could fix this permanently.

And your parade of horribles "spaghetti" probably isn't a legitimate concern. Once you have more than about 3 alternatives the margins are so low that 4 and 5 won't bother unless it really becomes necessary.

Re:good

[bondsbw]

This is great for cities where it is still profitable to build competitive infrastructure. Some areas (like my neighborhood) are just far enough away that we barely get one company to provide any service at all, and there's no competition to drive the prices down.

There will be a mixed bag of solutions, and regulating different areas differently is necessary.

Re:good

[Bert64]

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.

Re:good

[Tailhook]

Why else did the federal regulation prohibiting exclusive franchises not result in a burst of competitive cable companies?

Well we're reading a story about this very thing aren't we? Incumbents hindering deployments; you have to take ma bell to court to achieve anything. You need Google's deep pockets to even get started. The market has shown there is demand for alternatives; ever notice all the satellite dishes? If the incumbents could prevent rocket launches they would, but they can't so you get an alternative.

The costs you believe prevent alternatives are mostly legal and bureaucratic, not the infrastructure. Low voltage wiring and optical systems have very low maintenance costs; a small crew can maintain a large area just fine. I see that were I am now; small fiber companies profitably deploying to rural and semi-rural areas. They get good at boring and trenching and where they can find a friendly township council (often populated by people that are sick of being neglected) that will give them right-of-way they move in and do it. They are appearing the in huge gaps the incumbents have neglected for two decades now, and they are not being overwhelmed by maintenance costs.

Re:good

[Anonymous Coward]

> Incumbents not wanting new competitors "adjusting" their equipment for them. If you want to compete without moving the other guys stuff for him...

You... don't understand the "one touch make ready" thing.

This suit by Ma Bell tried to prevent Louisville from permitting Google Fiber's trained, bonded, insured, licensed, fully qualified workers from moving existing wiring around on city-owned poles only as much as was required to install new wiring to provide Google Fiber's service. This means that only _one_ company would have to touch the wiring on the pole to perform the new installation, hence the term "one touch make ready".

Google Fiber would be (and still is) on the hook for any disruption to service or damage their workers cause.

"One touch make ready" only _doesn't_ make sense if you have a _strong_ reason to believe that the workers who will be moving the wiring are improperly trained, or if the company doing the work will be unable to pay for any potential damage or service disruption.

If -on the other hand- your aim is to add months and months and months of delay _per pole_ to a competitor's deployment, getting rid of "one touch make ready" makes a _ton_ of sense.

> Maintenance costs go UP when there is a competitor busy moving your hardware around for you.

Nope. The guys who performed the work are on the hook for damages. It's _really_ that simple. You break it, you pay to have it fixed.

> And burying a cable in a culvert next to a road is a lot less expensive than under concrete in a city.

Many (most?) cities have conduit in place specifically for this sort of thing. Those that don't usually have overhead poles.

> If only maintenance were the only cost of building a cable physical plant.

Most of those cables were run twenty to fifty+ years ago. If the telcos and cablecos claim that they haven't recouped their initial investment, then they're goddamn liars.

Re:good

[Anonymous Coward]

> If Google contractors were operating withing the scope of the law that allows them to move AT-T stuff...

They _are_.

> "Oh, we didn't think that would disrupt your business operations" is all it takes for Google to not bother notifying AT-T of the action.

No, that's not how it works. Read the regulation. Ignorance doesn't shield you from the "reasonableness" test.

You'll probably be surprised at what Google Fiber is required to tell and pay to ATT. OTMR is a fix for incumbent's pernicious habits of adding _months_ if not _years_ of unnecessary delay to the pole attachment projects of competitors. It's not a shield that permits new players to destroy existing wiring.

Once you _read_ the OTMR regulations, you'll understand how your arguments here lack foundation:

http://library.amlegal.com/nxt/gateway.dll/Kentucky/loukymetro/titlexibusinessregulations/chapter116communicationandcabletelevisio?f=templates$fn=default.htm$3.0$vid=amlegal:louisville_ky$anc=JD_116.72

Read all of 116.72, but pay _particular_ attention to section (D)(2).

Let me know what part of that regulation permits Google Fiber to come in unannounced, fuck up a competitor's lines, and get away with not paying for the damage. Take special notice at how the guy attaching the new wires _has to pay for the post-work inspection performed by the guy whose equipment was moved_. Reaally burdensome, this regulation is!

I eagerly await your rebuttal, but I expect that you won't have anything useful to say. :(

Good for Google!

[EzInKy]

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.

Doesn't matter

[HeckRuler]

Just the act of putting it through the courts delayed Google and cost them enough money that the whole thing is unprofitable. They don't expand or their expansion is slower and AT&T doesn't face competition. With no competition, and essentially the only game in a lot of towns, they can milk those locations for the money it costs to put all of this through the courts.

Every city will be a legal battle to route the entrenched and established monopoly.

Yay late-stage capitalism. If someone like GOOGLE just isn't quite big enough to enter the market, then there is no free market and capitalism cannot function. It should be a public utility or the monopolies need to be broken up.

Re:Doesn't matter

[mishehu]

Problem is one of history already. Ma Bell always sucked, but at least once upon a time they were truly regulated as a utility, and they also had Bell Labs which had some redeeming value to it. Then the 1980's and 90's come around, and we smash Ma Bell up into the RBOC's. Except now all the RBOC's have been slowly reforming like the T1000 in slow motion to return to being Ma Bell, except now with very little regulation. Just look at that stooge and his stupid oversized coffee cup at the head of the FCC for all your answers to the questions of "what do the next few years have in store for us in the realm of telecommunications and internet access?"

Re:Doesn't matter

[Obfuscant]

It should be a public utility or the monopolies need to be broken up.

How do you "break up" a cable monopoly given that they are defacto and not dejure to start with? Do you force other companies to come provide service, or do you force the local cable company to break up into two or more companies all serving the same area? This ignores the reason for the defacto monopoly in the first place: the economics of multiple providers for a fixed number of customers.

Even when the Ma Bell monopoly was broken up, it didn't create competition in local service, it only created the regional Bells and opened up long distance.

I think AT-T's objection to this law is quite reasonable. There have been tales of one provider sabotaging the other's equipment posted here. Why do you think things will get better when the law says that one company can move the other company's stuff around at will? While I bet that nobody here cares that someone is moving AT-T's stuff, this could bite Google in the ass, too. AT-T will have the same right to move Google's hardware that Google has to move AT-T's. Yes, requiring the owner to do the moving is slower, but who is hurt when the courts get involved in determining fault for a major system outage created when one company breaks the other's stuff? The customers who wind up with no service, that's who. The question of fault is much clearer when the law says that AT-T cannot touch Google's cable plant. Imagine the battle when AT-T moves something of Google's, Google service goes down, and Google doesn't have to prove just that AT-T moved it, but that AT-T was negligent when it did so.

Re:Doesn't matter

[Bert64]

Nationalise the infrastructure, rent it at cost to any provider who wants to offer services to end users.

Re:Doesn't matter

[mishehu]

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.

Re: Doesn't matter

[bestweasel]

But that's commun... no, that's not the word, wait, sensible, that's it.

Re: Where's the Oral Argument?

[Darinbob]

Now I can see why the case was dismissed with prejudice if that's the typical AT&T argument.

Shady business as usual

[pak9rabid]

Make no mistake, this is simply AT&T trying to stall the deployment of Google Fiber. They tried to do the same shit here in Austin, not to mention other shady shit (like trying to persuade all of the local AT&T employees to write a letter to city council stating why it's unfair for the City to force them to allow Google on their poles).