And now we go live to Nashville for the latest on Google Fiber v AT&T and, yup, it's a mess Nashville's Google Fiber rollout has hit a pair of snags: rival carriers are, and this may surprise you, stalling the installation of lines needed for Google's new broadband network. AT&T in particular is battling Google's efforts to run cables from telephone poles around Music City, in Tennessee, US. The issue centers around …
The same antics by AT&T in Louisville too. Although, the Louisville city council has already passed an ordinance allowing Google contracts to move other lines on the pole - AT&T is challenging that ordinance in court. However, they neglected to get a restraining order - Google laid the fiber on the pole in front of my house last week.
AT&T may not have caused the gas line mess through trickery (moving the markers that tell the crew where to dig), sabotage (altering the plans that told the crew where to dig, or swapping the Do/Do Not markers), bribery (paying a digger to "accidently" hit the pipe), or some other form of BS tactic to make Google look bad. Lord knows AT&T has done all sorts of similar crap in the past, from causing competing crews to be unable to reach job sites by "accidently" blocking the roads needed to get there, paying to have poles "involved in traffic accidents" to topple them where those other crews needed to string cable, or rigging the pole pitons (those L brackets used by the climbers) to "accidently" fall out (uh huh, SURE it's entirely coincidental that your teams used that pole last week & had no issue, but two days later a different company's crew has a man sent to the hospital because the pitons fell out from over use?), or essentially tying the lines to the pole (instead of the hung down loop of spare cable hung from a convenient place near the pole, it was looped *around* the pole & thus prevented the other crews from doing any installs at all), or holding a pseudo-strike around the job site so the other crew's workers couldn't even get past the mob much less to the pole...
My uncle used to be a line man for a competitor to AT&T & was full of stories about all the crap AT&T would pull to thwart competition from getting to the poles at all. Heaven help the crew that DID manage to string cable, the next AT&T tech would invariably "Oopsie!" & render it a fuster cluck that required yet another visit to the pole... at which point it would start all over again. He said his favorite was when the AT&T guys left their ladder behind, *steel belted* by damaged pipe clamps to the bottom pitons. Not as in one end on the ground & the other against the pitons & thus climbable, but *suspended in air* about ten feet off the ground & in such a way that it took a team in a Cherry Picker lift to be hoisted up, cut loose the clamps, & take the ladder down in order to access the pole. My uncle laughed & got even though, the 'Picker crew *wrapped* the ladder around the pole like an over sized twist tie & left a Thank You note taped to the wrungs. They didn't waste the use of the 'Picker, they finished the job with it & strung the line, then left for the pub.
So I'm not too sure the "accident" with the Google digger crew was a real one, it smells like AT&T's up to it's old schennanigans again. =-/
I don't have any love for AT&T, but Google uses independent utility locating services to mark lines. The lines are painted on the ground so it's unlikely anyone is moving them. The gas incident most likely falls under shit happens. If the worst that happened is they had to shut down an intersection, they did OK. A contractor for Time Warner Cable locally hit a gas line, blew up a restaurant and killed someone.
My experience with Google crews is filling in holes where they pushed their cable under my driveway and cleaning up their trash. Service wise, once they got about a year of experience they have been pretty reliable.
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