The 234 Apartment

A group of small ISPs is asking America's broadband watchdog to ban exclusivity deals that lock apartment buildings to a single broadband provider . Incompas, a Washington DC advocacy group for ISPs and telcos, told the FCC in a filing [PDF] that it should end the practice of landlords and building owners making deals with a single internet provider to have exclusive access to multi-tenant environments (MTEs) like apartment buildings and condos. The group argues that such deals, which often include payments or kickbacks to landlords when their tenants sign up for service, harm consumer choice in America, and unfairly let large telcos freeze out smaller ISPs. "The considerable barriers to entry faced by competitive providers seeking access to MTEs imperils the business case for the deployment of next-generation networks and services to the thirty percent of American consumers who live in multi-unit premises," Incompas says in the filing, submitted yesterday. ...

Google Fiber won a major coup in its battle to simplify the pole attachment process via the One Touch Make Ready (OTMR) ordinance in Louisville, Kentucky, as a district court dismissed AT&T’s suit against the metro government. Louisville’s OTMR ordinance, which was passed in February 2016, would help ease Google Fiber ’s and other competitors’ movement into the Louisville broadband market by allowing them to move and install their own wiring on poles instead of waiting for AT&T and other service providers to conduct this work. This process, which is known as make-ready, requires new entrants like Google Fiber to wait months for existing providers like AT&T and Comcast to move their lines themselves. RELATED: Google Fiber seeks new sales, operations staff for Louisville, Kentucky AT&T, the incumbent telco in Louisville, filed a suit against Nashville, Tennessee, last year. In the suit (PDF), AT&T argued that the Nashville city council is overstepping its bound...