Perspectives on Louisville, pole attachments and fiber

Earlier this month, the city of Louisville, Kentucky approved an ordinance to make deploying fiber easier and cheaper: a One Touch Make Ready policy. for attaching fiber to utility poles. The community has been in talks with Google Fiber, who praised this move. This Thursday, AT&T has sued the City of Louisville over its ordinance. So what’s going on?

First, some background

The process to make a pole ready for fiber often works like this: a new broadband provider negotiates access to poles in a given area and then waits as all the other providers or entities that have equipment attached to those poles get in line, and one after another, bring construction crews in to move their own equipment around on the poles to make way for the new deployment. This process is referred to as “make-ready.” Everyone involved in the make-ready process loses: the existing users of the poles who have to move their equipment, the community residents who suffer through weeks and weeks of construction and the would-be broadband provider, who waste money as they wait.

So what’s happening now?

1. The Council has always supported requiring that all pole owners permit fiber builders to attach their facilities in a non discriminatory, cost based, and expeditious fashion.
2. The Council also supports expediting reasonable access and recently published a white paper supporting “one-touch” policies, which permit fiber deployers seeking access to poles to coordinate the make ready and attachments.
3. The Council further believes there’s a role for municipalities to facilitate access to poles in their public rights of way by requiring their franchisees that have poles to make those assets available on a reasonable basis
4. The Council is reviewing the Louisville ordinance and the AT&T complaint with these principles in mind to determine whether the federal and state statutes support the positive step taken by the city.