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AT&T and Comcast Finalize Court Victory Over Nashville and Google Fiber (arstechnica.com)
"AT&T and Comcast have solidified a court victory over the metro government in Nashville, Tennessee, nullifying a rule that was meant to help Google Fiber compete against the incumbent broadband providers," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The case involved Nashville's "One Touch Make Ready" ordinance that was supposed to give Google Fiber and other new ISPs faster access to utility poles. The ordinance let a single company make all of the necessary wire adjustments on utility poles itself instead of having to wait for incumbent providers like AT&T and Comcast to send work crews to move their own wires. But AT&T and Comcast sued the metro government to eliminate the rule and won a preliminary victory in November when a U.S. District Court judge in Tennessee nullified the rule as it applies to poles owned by AT&T and other private parties.
The next step for AT&T and Comcast was overturning the rule as it applies to poles owned by the municipal Nashville Electric Service (NES), which owns around 80 percent of the Nashville poles. AT&T and Comcast achieved that on Friday with a new ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Aleta Trauger. Nashville's One Touch Make Ready ordinance "is ultra vires and void or voidable as to utility poles owned by Nashville Electric Service because adoption of the Ordinance exceeded Metro Nashville's authority and violated the Metro Charter," the ruling said. Nashville is "permanently enjoined from applying the Ordinance to utility poles owned by Nashville Electric Service." The Nashville government isn't planning to appeal the decision, a spokesperson for Nashville Mayor Megan Barry told Ars today.
The next step for AT&T and Comcast was overturning the rule as it applies to poles owned by the municipal Nashville Electric Service (NES), which owns around 80 percent of the Nashville poles. AT&T and Comcast achieved that on Friday with a new ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Aleta Trauger. Nashville's One Touch Make Ready ordinance "is ultra vires and void or voidable as to utility poles owned by Nashville Electric Service because adoption of the Ordinance exceeded Metro Nashville's authority and violated the Metro Charter," the ruling said. Nashville is "permanently enjoined from applying the Ordinance to utility poles owned by Nashville Electric Service." The Nashville government isn't planning to appeal the decision, a spokesperson for Nashville Mayor Megan Barry told Ars today.
Government should not be playing favorites.
Maybe Governments should stop subsidizing the incumbents, even when the alternative is cheaper.
We all hate Google, but the AT&T and Comcast are worse, surely?
The city directs Nashville Electric to perform all work on the utility poles. Nashville Electric then bills Google for the expense. The work is done properly without some fly by night contractor coming in and breaking other people's stuff.
Why didn't Google propose this? Maybe they don't want to pay Nashville Electric to hire qualified people to do the work and just wanted to have low paid contractors?
To put it in terms we might understand, it is like if you wrote an important piece of software, then a competitor demanded the right to come in and change your software, but you still had all of the responsibility for it. If the competitor made errors and there were lawsuits, they would be held harmless and you would take the hit.
Moving pole infrastructure involves a lot of effort and great care. Cable TV amps are not just simple boxes, there are multiple runs of cable in the same strand in many places, and taps all over the place. It takes a certain amount of technology just to do the modifications and ensure everything is working again There simply will be outages.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Google needs to buy the power company (nation wide). The power company owns their own private Right-of-Way to every single house in the country. With ownership of that Google can implement a national fiber to the home network ending in a "Tripple play" box at the house, then rent bandwidth to anyone who wants it. Because Google would only be running a generic data network (not cable or tel) they would be exempt from all the regulations and the monopoly deals the cable and ISP's have made with State/local governments. Without owning the wires Google will always be paying the local ISP for customer data and fighting companies that want to compete with them by excluding them from the market. Owning the wires lets them see all the data (maximize revenue) and prevents the competition from locking them out of the market. Owning the wires is the only SANE long term strategy for Google to follow.