Pole Attachment Delays Vexing West Virginia Broadband Projects

WASHINGTON, Jan. 15, 2025 – Aging poles and challenging terrain are making for a time-consuming attachment process in West Virginia, an advocate said Wednesday. The state is considering following the lead of federal regulators to mediate disputes.

“It’s obviously a big issue for managing grant deadlines—and potentially losing access to time-sensitive grant funds—but the biggest piece is increased and unpredictable costs,” said Annie Stroud, broadband program director at Generation West Virginia, a career development nonprofit that does digital equity work in the state. She spoke at a Fiber Broadband Association webinar.

West Virginia is one of the 23 states that regulates pole access deals between utilities and broadband providers, which the Federal Communications Commission handles elsewhere. Stroud said the state is already seeing delayed timelines for projects funded by federal grants, a worrying sign when $1.2 billion in Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program money is on the cusp of becoming available. 

“The pole inventory itself is aging, a lot of the poles haven’t been replaced in a really long time,” she said. And because of the mountainous terrain, “they’re expensive to replace, they’re expensive to maintain.”

Those factors coupled with administrative delays from things like insufficient attachment requests from providers, understaffed utility companies, and varying contractor quality—issues that come up to some degree in most places—are all contributing to delays and conflicts, Stroud said.

Disputes related to pole access and allocating replacement costs is also a hot-button issue nationally, of course. ISPs argue utilities foist the cost onto attachers when old poles needed replacing anyway, a view Stroud said West Virginia providers share, to which pole owners would generally say they wouldn’t normally upgrade the poles in question and don’t want to pay just to accommodate more communications equipment.

For potential fixes, the state’s Public Service Commission set up a task force to address the issue in 2022. The group is considering taking some pages out of the FCC’s book, with a “rapid response team” to mediate disputes and more detailed utility inventory reporting requirements on the table. 

The task force is set to release a report with its final recommendations today, but it wasn’t posted as of this writing.

The FCC has an open rulemaking on the issue. It’s considering instituting a defined timeline for large attachment orders and requiring utilities to disclose more recent inspection reports, among other things, although whatever it decides won’t influence West Virginia or the other self-regulating states. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, set to become chair under the incoming Trump administration, has suggested there’s room for the agency to require pole owners to shoulder more replacement costs.