Disagreements among Nashville’s high-speed Internet providers are still rippling this week, with the divide actually growing deeper in terms of what action they want the Metro Council to take on a framework known as “One Touch Make Ready.”
Google is intent on passing the legislation, and says the policy would make it easier to attach wires to utility poles.
But AT&T Tennessee President Joelle Phillips went on the offensive Thursday to say the plan is “simplistic” and that it would be unsafe for work crews disruptive to existing contracts.
“It’s not ordinance or no ordinance. It’s this ordinance that Google has proposed that’s a bad ordinance,” Phillips said. “We should be spending time talking about all of the other ideas that might make the process work more efficiently.”
Phillips says Google’s single focus gets in the way. Her company made suggestions to streamline the utility pole permit process and to share engineering services — without the council taking action.
“For decades, we have been operating under rules that require us to share our infrastructure like utility poles,” she said. “We all want to make any system better. Until Google Fiber, the rest of the communications sector did not see this as such a priority to be ahead of everything else.”
In a statement, Google says those tweaks would allow the legacy companies to maintain an advantage.
“An ordinance is the appropriate way to create a consistent framework for the dozens of existing attachers and future providers,” the company said.
With the telecoms at odds, they anticipate more talks — and lobbying — before the next council debate scheduled for Sept. 6.
If the One Touch Make Ready ordinance were to pass, Phillips said she expects AT&T would sue.
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