State Officials Respond to Make-Ready Delays Affecting Broadband Projects

Preparing poles for broadband lines through the make-ready process can bottleneck state projects and requires great coordination, state broadband officials said. “Make-ready is the real uncertainty,” with the process delaying last-mile projects funded by Massachusetts state grants, said Massachusetts Broadband Institute (MBI) Chair Peter Larkin in an interview. New York set up a formal process to streamline pole attachments for its New NY Broadband Program, while Minnesota avoided pole issues with mostly underground infrastructure, their officials said. FCC Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee Vice Chair Kelleigh Cole said BDAC may help cure such problems in her state of Utah and elsewhere.

Managing many players is more challenging than physically stringing fiber, so MBI hosts weekly make-ready working group meetings with towns, the governor’s office, phone and cable providers, electric utilities and others, Larkin said. The group seeks to improve coordination for more than 40 towns and 40,000 poles receiving state help, he said. Completion dates for nine Comcast and three Charter Communications extension projects are delayed due to make-ready, and about 20 Massachusetts towns that received direct grants from the state's Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development are “dependent on completion of pole applications and Make Ready in a timely manner from Verizon, National Grid, and Eversource,” said an MBI program update last week.

Licensing new pole attachments is simple if space is available, MBI found. The process becomes lengthy and complicated when existing attachments must be moved to make space for new ones, if a new pole is needed or if the existing one needs to be replaced because it’s damaged or can’t take on more weight, it said. Only when pole licenses are secured can broadband infrastructure go up and be lit, it said. The whole process -- including finding space, applying for it, negotiating price, reconciliation, making it ready for new attachments, licensing and laying the fiber -- “takes two years, if you’re fast,” Larkin said. When poles are damaged or carrying too much weight, the latest attacher often gets “stuck with the bill,” frequently leading to fights over who should pay for a new pole, he said.

“Having worked with the utilities in weekly working group meetings, Comcast anticipates that it will meet all the deliverables under the grant disbursement agreement with the MBI,” a spokesman said. Charter will bring broadband "as quickly as possible" to the underserved in partnership with MBI, a spokeswoman said. "Charter has suffered from delays in getting access to utility poles, which has resulted in a significantly slower pace of deployment to these towns. We continue to support federal and state initiatives to streamline the pole attachment process so that we can more quickly and cost effectively bring the benefits of high speed broadband" to rural communities, she said.

For New York’s $500 million broadband program, “the state’s utility regulator asked all parties involved -- the major electric utilities and major telephone utilities serving the rural areas -- to develop a program to ensure that a smooth pole attachment process,” emailed New York Empire State Development Executive Vice President-Innovation and Broadband Jeffrey Nordhaus. New York Broadband Program Office and Department of Public Service staff coordinate with Charter and broadband grant winners “to work through reconciliation of data related to pole attachment applications and delays in pole licensing/release,” he said. The Public Service Commission has a 118-day shot clock for pole licensing, he added.

“In the ten months since that process began, there have been approximately 217,000 poles licensed or released for pole attachments by BPO awardees and Charter,” Nordhaus said. New York “remains vigilant to ensure timely processing of applications against an unprecedented level of applications due to the massive upstate fiber expansion resulting from Charter’s buildout and the New NY Broadband Program.” Charter said delays getting access to poles slowed its New York broadband expansion (see 1805100023).

Minnesota’s private partners say they don’t often face make-ready problems because most of their work is underground, said Minnesota Office of Broadband Development Executive Director Danna MacKenzie. While make-ready may be less of a problem for her state's broadband grant projects, MacKenzie said it's a big policy discussion nationally and in other states.

BDAC is addressing make-ready delays as it pursues ways to streamline infrastructure buildout, said Cole, the BDAC vice chair and director of the Utah Broadband Outreach Center. The advisory committee, expected to wrap its final report in July (see 1805010058), hopes “information that we are putting together would provide a model for states to tackle these coordination issues that we’re hearing are slowing down the deployment of infrastructure,” said Cole. The FCC didn’t comment.

Model state legislation includes simplifying the make-ready process by allowing one provider to move all attachments -- also known as one-touch, make-ready -- in circumstances where a line could be moved without causing outages, Cole said. When BDAC finishes the model bill, each state could modify language to suit local needs before passing it through its legislature, she said. “Hopefully, it provides a really good starting place and it helps frame some of the key issues in deploying broadband.”

“If they come in with a better idea, believe me, we'll embrace it,” said Larkin of federal efforts. “Especially with money attached.” Larkin is observing BDAC and FCC work and hopes the Trump administration's infrastructure bill may offer more flexible funding for broadband but is more focused on what MBI can do to spur broadband within its jurisdiction: “Waiting for the federal government to solve your problems is a lost cause.”