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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?
Instead to compete with the incumbents, you become beholden on them if you want to provide service to a new customer (which probably means they will be losing a customer) I'm sure they will pull out all the stops.
Nashville Electric Service should require that only their contractors can work on wires on their poles, and provide the same SLA's and charge the same fees to all customers.
While I have serious skepticism over "one touch make ready" rules, there need to be some checks and balances to prevent incumbents from milking the process to slow down competition. The utilities should have primary ownership and control of their services on the pole, within whatever lease rights they have to the property.
However, if they fail to act in a reasonable time frame, I see no reason why there should be no practical recourse; OTMR does that. The contractor making changes should still comply with the carriers' change-control procedures, identifying any poles they are about to touch both in advance and day-of-modification, and checking out when work is complete.
I am surprised that Nashville didn't do this in a different way since they own the poles. A lease amendment with reciprocal terms would seem reasonable for starters.
Forget the FCC rules! This is the real problem. With real competition, filtering would not be an issue.
If google purchased Nashville Electric Service (and the contractors authorized to work on their power poles, and prioritized AT&T and Comcast installs and repairs accordingly.
Really? I don't have any skepticism. Without rules like this, I can tell you exactly how this situation goes:
Google needs access to a particular pole as no available ground is around for them to put up one of their own. They contact the owner - let's say AT&T. AT&T replies that they have to go through a risk analysis: after all, there's a lot of important stuff on that pole.
Google hears nothing. In the mean time the clock is running, their investments in other infrastructure that is waiting on this pole are sitting costing money, etc. AT&T never responds, but when Google goes back to them they reply that the risk Assessment is done but they have to pass it through engineering as well.... and the public utility uses the pole already. So Google needs to get clearance from the local utility before AT&T will let them use the pole.
More weeks go by....... and eventually AT&T strangles any competition that needs access to that pole / tower / etc.
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?
> AT&T and Comcast are refusing or otherwise massively delaying moving the "wires, cables, etc" so that Google can not complete their rollout.
IANALawyer, but I would think the correct solution would be in the terms of pole access. Say, a requirement to either perform within a reasonable period at a reasonable fee any requested maintenance relating to other tenants' use of the infrastructure, or be billed for the pole owner's chosen vendor to do it for you. With a penalty clause for failure to comply set as loss of use of the poles.
A thought experiment...
How could a local community escape the demand to use a telco monopoly?
Dont got anywhere near the monopoly network.
Talk to the electric company (consumer, city), rail road, power company (state), water company, local businesses, private land owners.
Build a community network that spans out from different utility services, rail, power networks, land back to business and commercial real estate.
An innovative private sector cooperative initiative that brings together everyone locally but the wireline monopoly telco. Let the locals support an ISP from the back of that new private network.
Call it a network on a utility cooperative with local profits reinvested for network infrastructure. Any is ISP welcome from the same city, state, another state.
City and local gov did nothing for the existing telco monopoly to get legal about.
Some locals wanted a new network and they built it on private land that just happened to be linked by non telco private sector utilities.
What can a monopoly telco do? Block the local gov, community broadband first? Then demand a stop to the private sector in the same community second?
Thats a lot of monopoly power to enforce federally on both state, city governments and the private sector.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It basically allowed Google to legally declare open warfare on the incumbent operators
Except the rule was that whoever touched it had to reimburse the affected by 150%. So if Google did knock out AT&T service, they'd owe AT&T 150% cost lost.
Government should not be playing favorites
HA! You should talk to Marsha Blackburn and ask her about her relationship with AT&T.
If the competitor made errors and there were lawsuits, they would be held harmless and you would take the hit.
No.
What you are describing is what they were attempting to do. It got shot down. Now AT&T can just refuse to ever move the wires (in effect making the "reasonable fee" infinite) and Google is blocked.
More like run a few 100kv through the wires.