USTelecom Lobbies FCC Staff to Maintain Pole Replacement Costs Rules

USTelecom asked the FCC to maintain current rules on costs that arise from pole replacements and attachments (see 2208290047). The rules are "simple, effective and easy to apply," the group said in a meeting with Wireline Bureau staff, per an ex parte posted Monday in docket 17-84. Changing them would "not only do nothing to facilitate broadband deployment, it would likely undermine deployment goals and introduce competitive distortions and bad economic incentives," it said. The FCC should "enforce the rules that are already in place" and not "depart from its decades-long approach to the cost-causation principle," USTelecom said.