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Comment by nashashmi | Hacker News Reader

This is bad. I love google fiber and see that what they are trying to do is valid but when one utility company touches another company's facilities it compromises the other facility and makes it vulnerable for service disruption.

But the regulation to ban or allow should not come at the Federal level. It should be governed by the utility pole owner.

In NYC for example con Ed owns a large number of poles. And then Verizon owns the next number of poles. Verizon and other utility companies pay ConEd based on how high their utility is placed. If it's a Verizon pole, Verizon will put their facility on the very top and spectrum will put their facility on the lower part.

This means that another utility company cannot just come and move someone else's facility around.

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On the flip side, that means there's nothing to stop the pole owner from delaying, as (if I understand correctly) Google argued was happening here. Sure, you could try to fine uncooperative owners, but the delay will kill small ISPs who can't afford to wait; the potential fine would have to massive to deter such behavior, and between lobbying and general antipathy toward regulation, that size of fine would likely never occur.

I don't disagree though that there should be some form of middle ground (which it seems Pai was trying to find) -- I'm just unsure what it would be.

I understand where you are coming from, but you must be blind to think that the biggest issue facing the American telecom industry is service disruption due to competitors having too much access to the utility poles. While you are right that this does create a bigger opportunity for small service disruptions, the bigger issue is that even when its not disrupted service in many area's is horrible, and expensive. While a private company might have paid to put the poles in they should be treated like the shared limited resource that they are, and there should be universally accepted rules on how the current "owner" has to allow other to access it.

I will go so far as to say there is not a single citizen who will have a net negative result of this ruling.

This isn't a hypothetical issue. Comcast has historically been known to "accidentally" sever competing service lines when installing their own: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/lawsuit-comcast-...

Why are poles a "shared limited resource"? They're sticks of wood, companies can either pay to put up their own, or pay to use someone else's.

And then you'll have beautiful cities with nice streetscapes.

Seriously, if you don't want your street corners to look like a black deathball or [something straight out of Stranger Things][1], you need to consider those poles as "shared limited resource".

[1]: https://twitter.com/pketron/status/938097381064654848

You can’t have everything. People crow about how Japan has fast fiber and why can’t we have it too. Have you ever seen Tokyo? There are above ground electric lines and cables everywhere. This is right downtown: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.7001104,139.7314866,3a,75y,1.... There’s a reason why Google targeted Fiber in places like Kansas City first—few dense American cities habe above ground utilities, primarily due to aesthetic concerns.

>>>They're sticks of wood

lol... how about no....

That is such a simplistic view of the infrastructure it is bordering on willful ignorance of the topic

It's an oversimplification, sure, but the reality is: Most of the poles being fought over are a given company's actual property that they built and have to maintain, and they are entirely right in trying to defend them from a competitor paying government officials to pass laws granting them the ability to tamper with another company's property and disrupt their services.

Furthermore, the government isn't paying them for these poles in this case, they're forcing a company to allow it's competitors to tamper with and likely disrupt their customer's service. If the government wants to nationalize "the infrastructure", I'm all for it, but then they'd be paying out a lot of money to buy this equipment from the companies that actually own it.

As someone really annoyed when my Internet drops out in the middle of a game, I'm drastically opposed to these sorts of hijinks, I don't need my ISP's competitor taking out my lines at the same time as sending me mailers about how their service is so much more reliable.

>>Furthermore, the government isn't paying them for these poles in this case,

ohhh yes they are... They are allowing these companies free use the land those poles are sunk into free of charge from which they force the owners of said properly to allow them to use under the Utility Easement programs.

In most instances the government is also giving them some kind of Monopolistic control over the market segment they service. i.e there is only 1 Telephone Provider, or 1 Electrical Company for that area. In exchange for these FREE things the government requires these companies to SELL attachments to their poles at a reasonable fee. I.e when Comcast wants to connect to a Electrical Pole they pay a monthly FEE to the utility companies

To believe the utility companies some how being harmed just does not match reality

I agree that it makes it vulnerable to service disruption, but mostly in the opposite of the way you're suggesting.

When I lived in Baltimore, it was a well-known problem among all the ISPs I asked for DSL service that, while you needed a Verizon tech to interact with their lines from the pole even if you were using another ISP, the Verizon techs would often outright not show up without notice and leave the ISP's techs sitting there, apologetic and unable to do anything.

After trying this with 3 different DSL ISPs (and multiple attempted appointments per ISP), I concluded that it was unlikely all 3 of them were telling the same lie.

I've known people who've worked within telecom sales. Employees of any area's dominant phone company are specifically trained to call their control of the lines out as a benefit of not using one of the smaller competitors to whom they're legally obligated to sell space. It becomes part of their pitch. Something to the effect of "Use [AT&T/Sprint/whomever] because we control the lines and our jobs always get done -- other jobs, maybe not so much." is frequently heard.

Not an issue. It doesn’t supercede states with their own laws. From the article:

The FCC rules also don't apply in states that have opted out of the federal regime in order to use their own methods of regulating pole attachments. Twenty states and Washington, DC, have previously opted out of the federal pole-attachment rules, while pole attachments in the other 30 states are governed by FCC rules.

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