Cities will sue FCC to stop $2B giveaway to wireless carrier

This is how you stand for profit over people.

I'm kind of torn on this because I can see both sides of it. Some cities charge an insane amount to license a pole, others charge less. Should a small town be able to charge a $50,000 per year rent to put up a cell tower? Doesn't seem right, but in a densely packed city where space is tight maybe it makes sense to stop companies from dumping infrastructure. Then there are the time deadlines. Every worked with government that doesn't have a time deadline? For instance ever applied for a permit that has no final issue deadline? They can sit on it for a decade and you can't do anything about it. I don't agree with the FCC, but I also don't think cities should be able to stifle the industry. I don't think there is a great solution on either side.

I went into this expecting to side 100% with the cities but after reading it I'm divided. I completely understand wanting to cut through some of the government bureaucracy and impose limits on time and cost of putting up these devices but at the same time then umber feel rather low.

That said it seems very wasteful that our 2-3 phone carriers are all going to be putting up new equipment, I'm not sure if there is any law/rule/agreement about them sharing but it seems stupid to have a 5G modem for T-mobile, AT&T, Verizon all on the same pole incurring the same maintenance and cost.

It's not quite as wasteful as it might seem.

Even if there was just one national carrier that owned all of T-Mobile/AT&T/Verizon, they'd still need close to the current amount of RRUs + gear + backhaul, to support the same number of total users on all of the various spectrum bands being used.

There would be some maintenance/cost savings. But not a huge night-and-day difference.

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For what it's worth, Portland charges $250/month for a point of presence (from the article). I'm no cellular expert, but from my WISP days, that's the cheapest rate I've ever heard of for a such a thing, short of donations on farms and windmills and the like. Similar rent on a cell tower would cost $1,000 to $3,000+/month.

I'm totally open to the idea that cities could be overcharging for utility pole access -- that a few cities abuse the hell out of this authority and that this should be corrected. But the FCC's rule forces Portland to drop the rent from $250/month to just $22/month. At this extremely low price point, I suspect the city of Portland would actually be subsidizing the majority of these site costs for cellular providers, at the expense of their city's budget.

For comparison, it costs something like $2k to $3k just to build or replace a single pole (in cheap low-CoL suburban areas, using cheap wood non-metal poles). At $22/month, if a pole was used by Verizon alone, a city wouldn't break even on the cheapest possible initial pole costs for about 10 years (and that's assuming it never needs maintenance or repair or temporary movement ever).

If cities lose this fight, I would expect them to raise their income taxes and/or property taxes to cover the money the FCC is making them give cellular telecoms.

I am stunned that the FCC is not conditioning the receipt of this money with targets (phased giveaway where completion of one task triggers the next payment) and agreement by the mobile carriers to have their rate plans regulated until this money is repaid.

If you're going to use government money paid to private corporations to do this then the private corporations should pay the government back out of the regulated rates. After that, the infrastructure is paid for, and so long as it's available under the same terms to others, go nuts.