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No, and AFAIK, in Austin all the early roll outs were in older neighborhoods with physical poles. I'm not sure if google was lashing their cables to existing lines, but I saw TWC doing that a lot when they were splitting nodes here. It was amazingly fast they would show up with a truck and lash a half mile of cable in a couple hours.

Of course one of the early slowdowns was AT&T throwing a fit about google sharing poles owned by AT&T.



1) pole rights matter. In San Francisco, att also owns the poles and does everything they can to prevent other people from using them. I would tell installs that it would be 30 days from the day we got permitted until the circuit was installed, but that despite there being a 30-day limit on replies for pole permits, many times att would wait 180 days before issuing access permits. It was honestly a joke around the office.

2) many cities do not have above-ground power and fewer still have above-ground telco without power. I have not researched this extensively so I am not sure if google picked places with poles specifically, but that would be a smart move. That being said, imagining att would let them use the poles was not really reasonable.




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