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It's more complicated than that.

- Many poles are owned by power companies, or telephone companies. You can absolutely get a JPA (joint pole attach) agreement with most of these companies in theory.

- In practice, your first problem is that most poles are horribly maintained. And if you are a new attachee, you will often find yourself having to share in the cost to make an already non-compliant pole compliant and with enough room for you to attach.

- If you are dealing with, say, Verizon poles and are trying to attach for a competing cell service, your make ready costs are oddly inflated, and they may go as far as expect you to split the cost 50/50 for a pole that is already out of spec.

- In many municipalities, the kickbacks of 'franchise agreements' cause a lot of inertia. This is mostly the case with CATV, the industry of 'how can we be minmax our monopoly'. Essentially, the cable provider pays the city X dollars per subscriber, gives them a couple public access channels, and in return gets exclusivity.

I used to do HFC design for Xfinity Fraudband, as well as fiber design/permitting for other CATV providers and cell carriers. Its a corrupt and abusive industry, the entire contractor/subcontractor system is made to shield the companies both from overall liability as well as prevent unionization.

Also, any of the SV folks speaking up about social injustice would have a heart attack in a week or two. Being in that climate for so long made me numb to a lot of injustice, and it took years to recover.




Seem like the municipality needs to own and control it's own poles more than anything.




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