CTIA, PCIA Urge 178-Day Deadline for Pole Attachment Make-Ready
Pole owners should have 178 days maximum for make-ready work under coming FCC rules, CTIA and a membership section of PCIA said in separate filings posted Wednesday on the commission’s website in docket 07-245. PCIA said it would settle for 148-day deadlines in cases in which “multiparty cooperation is not required.” A Sunesys filing called deadlines “unquestionably needed” but didn’t specify what they should be. The Edison Electric Institute said in filings that telcos are glibly ignoring complications that can foul up deadlines, and the commission must “adopt strong incentives to ensure … the safety and reliability” of the power grid.
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The commission is expected to vote on an order on pole attachments at its April 7 meeting (CD March 9 p5). A reduction in attachment rates is expected. Sunesys and Frontier told the commission in separate meetings that lowering rates is wise. Frontier Chief Legal Officer Kathleen Abernathy, a former FCC commissioner, said the commission should “correct the competitive inequities by ensuring that rates for all broadband attachers are uniformly low,” said an ex parte notice filed by the company. Sunesys said 42 percent of its broadband deployment costs “consist of pole attachment and rights of way charges.”
But the question of timelines has dominated the past few days’ discussion. PCIA said a power company “could have a rebuttable presumption … that it needs additional time” for make-ready work. PCIA and CTIA said Utah, Vermont and Massachusetts have set rigid deadlines for wireless attachments and they have allowed “successful and swift buildout.” When utilities miss deadlines, telcos should bring in outside contractors for make-ready, Sunesys said. CTIA said the “record in this proceeding is replete with evidence of the discriminatory and unreasonable barriers that some electric utilities have erected against wireless attachments” and “commission action is needed.”
But the telcos are ignoring “force majeure type events” such as storms, as well as state and local regulatory proceedings, deficient applications, “failure of an attaching entity to respond” to requests for more information or “to cooperate in moving its facilities” and power companies’ need to bring their poles “up to code when a new attachment is added to a pole,” Edison said in its comments. Instead, the commission should focus on the safety and reliability of the power grid by requiring telcos “to provide a surety through either a bond or a letter of credit to cover any potential damages” of the attachment.
There’s also the question of unauthorized attachments, Edison said. In Oregon, for instance, violators must pay $500 per pole, fees “of five times the current annual rental fee” if the violation is self-reported, and an additional $200 per safety violation, “plus the actual costs of correcting all violations. Under the system, power companies have “a rebuttable presumption that if an unauthorized attachment is in violation of an applicable safety requirement, the attacher caused the safety violation,” they're “allowed to impose an enforceable time limit … to correct safety violations,” and are allowed to fix “imminently hazardous” conditions immediately and recover their money later, Edison said.