On September 6th, the Nashville Metro Council approved a proposed One Touch Make Ready (OTMR) ordinance by a wide margin of 32-7 on a roll call vote (computers were down). This was the second vote to advance the ordinance, designed to streamline deployment of fiber-optic networks in a city looking for better connectivity. Elected officials responded to Nashville residents who flooded their council members’ offices with emails.

The Nashville Metro Council will take up the ordinance one last time; passage could speed up competition in the country music capital. Google Fiber has been pushing for a OTMR, while incumbents AT&T and Comcast look for a non-legislative solution to the problem of the poles while protecting their positions as dominant Internet Service Players (ISPs).

Caught Between A Rock And A Hard Stick

The city of Nashville sits on limestone, a rock that cannot support the trenching and underground work of fiber deployment. The only other option is to use the utility poles. Eighty percent of the poles are owned by the public utility Nashville Electric Service (NES), but incumbent provider AT&T owns the other 20 percent. Google Fiber says it needs to attach fiber to 88,000 poles in Nashville to build its network and about half of those (44,000) need to be prepared to host their wires. 

Pole attachments are highly regulated, but there are still gray areas. Susan Crawford provides an overview of the policies and regulations on BackChannel; she accurately describes how poles can be weapons that guard monopoly position. Currently, each company that has equipment on the poles must send out a separate crew to move only their own equipment. This process can drag on for months. The OTMR ordinance is a deceptively simple solution to this delay. 

Deceptively Simple, But Regulated

In 2015, Nashville welcomed Google Fiber with open arms, anticipating all the possibilities gigabit connectivity could mean for businesses and residents. The deployment is moving slowly, however, in part because of time consuming make ready work on utility poles. In order to speed up the process and establish better policy for the city in general, Nashville has just introduced a one touch make ready ordinance.

Too Many Wires

A recent Nashville Scene article described the situation, common in a number of communities where utility poles already carry a number of wires:

The thousands of poles that stand around the city, most of which are owned by Nashville Electric Service, are arranged with power on top and communications equipment in a line below that. In Nashville, this means NES equipment pushes electricity up top, while broadly speaking, gear from Comcast and AT&T — whether for home phone, cable or internet service — operates below. 

Enter Google Fiber. Because Nashville largely sits on a massive bed of limestone rock, running cable underground is, for the most part, not a viable option. That means Google has to join its new friends in the industry on the poles, through a process known as Make Ready. In a typical scenario, that involves Google — or any other new company trying to enter the market or get on a particular pole — notifying NES, which will then notify each telecom company that it needs to send a crew to the pole — one after another — to move their equipment and accommodate the new party. The process can take months, even if contractually mandated time frames are followed. Google Fiber officials and operatives working on their behalf suggest that’s not always the case. 

One-Stop Approach

The Decentralized Web Summit: Locking the Web Open will happen on June 8th and 9th at Internet Archive in San Francisco. The event will be live streamed if you can’t attend in person.

The event is a discussion of the future of the web. From the Summit website:

The World Wide Web is fragile. Links break and website content can disappear forever. The Web is not universally accessible. It is too easy for outside entities to censor connections, controlling what people can and cannot view on the Web. The Web is also not very private, exposing users to mass surveillance by corporations and governments. A Decentralized Web can address all of these problems by building in privacy, security and preservation by default, ensuring that websites are easily accessible to all as long as at least one person somewhere in the world is hosting a copy.

Keynote speakers will be Vint Cerf, considered one of the “Fathers of the Internet” and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google; Cory Doctorow, Special Advisor at the Electronic Frontier Foundation; and Brewster Kahle, Founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive.

The list of presenters includes a number of innovators, tech leaders, and journalists. Panel discussions cover a range of relevant topics, including innovation, privacy, and security. There will also be workshops and Q & A to address your specific concerns.

You can check out the schedule, register to attend online, and learn more about the decentralized web by reviewing some of the resources the team has made available. The event is sponsored by the Internet Archive, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Google, and Mozilla.

In our experience, just about every community considering building a community network considers open access. They want to enable new choices for services and often would prefer the local government avoid directly competing with existing service providers, for a variety of reasons. However, we are only tracking 30 open access networks on our just-released Open Access resource page.

Many of the communities that start off enthusiastic about open access ultimately decide to have a single service provider (themselves or a contractor) to have more certainty over the revenues needed to pay operating expenses and debt. We believe this will change as the technology matures and more communities embrace software-defined networks (SDN) -- but before tackling that topic, we think it is important to discuss the meaning of open access.

On a regular basis, I get an email from one deep-thinking person or another that says, "That network isn't really open access." They almost always make good points. The problem is that different people embrace open access for different reasons - they often have different expectations of outcomes. Understanding that is key to evaluating open access.

How Many ISPs?

One of the key questions centers on how many providers a household is likely to be able to choose from. Various factors, including the network architecture and economics of becoming a service provider, will influence this outcome.

Some communities simply seek to avoid a monopoly network - they are focused on the idea of potential competition. For instance, we believe Huntsville's model and agreement with Google can be considered open access because any party could lease fiber from the utility to compete with Google. However, we believe the costs of doing so by using that network architecture make robust competition unlikely.

On the border of Kentucky and Indiana a fight is brewing as AT&T and Google Fiber have both announced plans to bring Gigabit Internet service to Louisville, Kentucky. Home to over half a million, the city could see major economic development with new ultra high-speed Internet access, but there’s a problem: the utility poles.

AT&T is suing the city over a “one touch make-ready” ordinance. On February 11, 2016, the Louisville Metro Council passed the ordinance in order to facilitate new competitors, i.e. Google Fiber. 

Utility Poles: Key to Aerial Deployment

Make-ready is the shorthand for making a utility pole ready for new attachments. Although it may seem simple, this process is often expensive and time-consuming. To add a new cable, others may have to be shifted in order to meet safety and industry standards. Under the common procedure, this process can take months as each party has to send out an independent crew to move each section of cabling. 

To those of us unfamiliar with the standards of pole attachment it may seem absurd, but this originally made sense. Utility poles have a limited amount of space, and strict codes regulate the placement of each type of cable on the pole. Competitors feel they have to fiercely guard their space on the pole and cannot trust other providers to respect their cables. Make-ready must involve coordination between multiple providers and the utility pole owners. For some firms, like AT&T, this is an opportunity to delay new competition for months.

Huntsville Utilities and Google Fiber announced today that the utility will construct a dark fiber network and that Google Fiber will offer services to the community via the city's new fiber infrastructure investment.

We applaud Huntsville and Google for helping develop an innovative model that will create more choices for local businesses and residents. We believe this is an important step that can lead to a true market for Internet access, allowing people a real choice in providers while ensuring the network is accountable to local needs.

Next Century Cities (NCC) describes the arrangement as a "promising new model for ensuring greater access to high-quality broadband Internet." We see this as a significant step forward in creating competition and bringing high quality Internet access to every one. For many years, we have seen communities desire to invest in infrastructure but not have to engage in service competition with powerful rivals like Comcast or AT&T.

Huntsville Is Different

Google Fiber is already known for bringing affordable gigabit service to subscribers in Kansas City and Provo, Utah and they have plans to expand in a number of other communities. Huntsville will be more than "just another" Google Fiber community because the infrastructure will belong to the community.

Other providers will be able to offer services via the network as well, ensuring more competition and providing choice for residents and businesses. Smaller providers will have an easier time establishing themselves in Huntsville with infrastructure in place on which to offer services. If subscribers are not happy with one provider, there is a good chance that there will be other options.