Yes, the above title is a play on words about the philosophical question about the tree falling in a forest and whether it makes noise. A little more than a week ago, telecommunications’ cables fell to the ground and no one really heard or saw what happened. Fortunately, no one was injured and service was apparently not lost, but it is a mystery as to why it happened. This failure points to a bigger battle playing out in Washington and Sacramento over some pretty arcane telecom rules.

According to the local letter carrier, it was around noon when the telecommunications’ wires started wildly undulating like a rope bridge across a windy canyon. He saw this violent shaking from probably 1,000 feet from where the lines had crashed to the ground.  Another witness reportedly heard the snap of a support pole, but his back was turned to the intersection and he didn’t see the cause.

The support pole was apparently a vestige of the original infrastructure, where it helped stabilize a utility pole via approximately 100 feet of guy wires that crossed the street. Less than a year ago, that utility pole was replaced with a self-supporting pole. Instead of re-positioning the telecommunications’ cables directly on the self-supporting pole, the portion of the old utility pole that had the telecommunications’ cables, was attached to the new self-supporting pole (it was sawed off from the rest of the now removed pole).

One of the electric utility workers, who was on site for the repair of the support pole, suggested that the cables should have been re-positioned to the new pole months earlier. Later in the evening, the telecommunications’ utility workers removed the last remnants of the old pole and moved both the cable television and telephone cables directly to the new self-supporting pole. Interestingly, the electric utility replaced the cracked support pole with a new one and reconnected the guy wires. Since the support pole now connects to a self-supporting pole, this doesn’t make sense, other than perhaps it was easier and faster to replace the support pole than to do the engineering to prove it was no longer needed.

But the mystery remains regarding the cause of the cable collapse. One of the telecommunications’ workers suggested that maybe a tall vehicle, such as a garbage truck, clipped the strand. The problem with this theory is that it wasn’t garbage day, so it would be highly unlikely that a garbage truck would have been at this relatively quiet, neighborhood intersection.

Even if it was garbage day, there should be enough clearance that even the tallest of trucks should be able to pass under without clipping the strand; if not, then it’s either poor engineering or installation of the cable strands. Further, there was no apparent damage to the cable or strand, as one would expect from a vehicle pulling a cable with enough force to snap a utility pole.

Another theory is that there was too much tension on the strands that support the cables and that eventually the stress became too much and pulled the old pole from the new pole, resulting in the snapping of the support pole. The new strand was installed a little more than year ago, when the local telephone company installed fiber optic cable. It was around this time that the old pole was replaced with the self-supporting pole. Presumably, the various utilities discovered that the older pole needed replacing, when they performed the outside plant engineering for the fiber network. At the time of construction, this author documented questionable construction practices, such as tying off fiber cable spools to its competitor’s strand.

The repairs have been made and it’s doubtful there will be an investigation into the cause. There were some direct costs, such as the 7 or 8 hours that Community Service Officers had to redirect traffic at the intersection and the cost of emergency electrical utility crews, that will probably never be recovered by those entities.

It does point to a larger issue and that is what is the best way to manage and maintain the public rights-of-way and the associated hardware within those rights-of-way? This incident raises many other questions, including:

• Why weren’t the cables transferred from the old pole directly to the new pole earlier?
• What is the process and who is checking to ensure that construction is complete?
• What is the process for the public to report outside plant issues and is the process so convoluted that it’s not worth the effort?
• Does the entity that owns the pole in the public right-of-way know what assets are hanging off its poles?
• Given these poles and associated cables are in the public rights-of-way, should the metadata about these assets (e.g. size, weight) be available in an open database? The idea is that new broadband entrants could easily access such an open database to assess the potential for overbuilds using the existing infrastructure. The public could potentially report problems via an app as well.
• What is the balance between local aesthetics versus the societal benefit of broadband?
• How often does the utility pole owner perform regular safety inspections for both the pole and the equipment hanging on and off the pole (e.g. the drooping strand theory posited above)?

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  What is the most effective way to manage the rights-of-way that maximizes public benefit, while ensuring safety? More specifically, what is the most effective way to allocate the limited real estate on the poles? For example, the carrier that installed fiber still has its older copper cables attached to the pole line – are they paying for that space as well?

These are the type of questions that should have been addressed in the just vetoed (PDF) California State Senate Bill, SB-649. It is beyond the scope of this article to comment in detail on that vetoed legislation, but pole attachment fees, which were a contentious part of that legislation, are the source of funds for maintaining the aerial rights-of-way, so getting the fees right is important.¹

If legislators propose new legislation to replace the vetoed SB-649, they must find the balance between removing barriers to deployment of wired and wireless broadband, while ensuring that near-term shortcuts do not cause long-term serious problem. We were lucky this time, but falling strands and falling utility poles are disruptive and potentially deadly.

¹SB-649 only dealt with publicly owned poles in the rights-of-way, not privately owned poles.