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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

TFA isn't clear about this, but I suspect that all of the poles in question are actually owned by LG&E who operate the electrical lines that hang from them. So "...its utility poles" in the title should actually be "...the same utility poles it uses". There probably is some dumb FCC rule that supports ATT's position here, because after all those rules are written by ATT. One hopes that courts would decide FCC don't govern how LG&E's poles are used. If any agency would, surely it would be DoE?

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As others have mentioned, the poles in Louisville are owned mostly by a mix of AT&T (about 40%) and our local power utility (Louisville, Gas & Electric; LG&E) (about 60%).

But pole ownership really isn't relevant, here. The right for new companies to attach to the poles isn't in doubt, and isn't part of this dispute.

The dispute here is part of the make ready process...who has the right to rearrange the wires already on the pole to make space for the new attacher? Even the right to have the space made available isn't in doubt...it's merely who does the actual work of making it available.

Having worked at a CLEC in the mid-2000s, I can well imagine the pain involved in ATT "making ready" a utility pole. If they have a 60-day window, then in the typical case, on day 58 they'll bounce your work order with some nonsensical reason code. So you hurry to follow up with your service rep that day, but she'll have to "investigate", which will take until the weekend, and then you'll get a "just resubmit it" on next Tuesday. Then if you're lucky the made_ready status in the database will change sometime in the next 60 days. At no point will a tech actually visit the pole in question. They just figure that it's right and proper for a competitor of theirs to have to wait three months to serve a customer.

> TFA isn't clear about this, but I suspect that all of the poles in question are actually owned by LG&E who operate the electrical lines that hang from them

TFA article says, "Most of the poles used by AT&T in the area are owned by AT&T or Louisville Gas & Electric".

The editor who wrote the title must not have read that far. b^)

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