Untapped Opportunity in the Joint use Challenge
Michael Dolan
Director of Operations Development
LineSoft Corporation
12310 East Mirabeau Parkway
Spokane, WA 99216
Bill McCoy
Joint Use Administrator
American Electric Power
850 Tech Center Drive
Gahanna, OH 43230
Abstract
Demand for Joint Use attachment is a pressing challenge for today’s electric utilities. From cable to telecommunications to municipal, everyone is vying for space on the utility pole. The stakes are very high for all parties, and time is of the essence. Attachees face a steadily shrinking window of financial opportunity. Utilities must respond promptly or incur substantial consequences for non-compliance. Most important, attachments could weaken the electric utility infrastructure, causing a breakdown in energy delivery to customers and resulting in high liability costs.
American Electric Power, working with LineSoft Corporation, confronted and overcame the Joint Use challenge of several third party communication companies’ desire to attach to their existing poles. The company employed a new approach that allowed them to respond within legislated timeframes with an unarguable engineering analysis of each structure. This solution addressed issues of code compliance and facilitated equitable cost sharing with third parties to execute the work needed to safely attach.
Beyond supporting the attachment process, utilities are learning that data that is collected through this attachment process and is required for evaluating and permitting joint use attachments represents a substantial untapped opportunity to update GIS records. However, to obtain the data, utilities must overcome legal, technical, and budgetary issues. This paper discusses the issues regarding access to this data and lists several options that can be employed for obtaining it.
Background Conditions
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 requires pole owners to provide non-discriminatory access to their poles and lines. As a result, multiple telecommunication companies sought access to American Electric Power Company’s poles in the Columbus, Ohio Region. Prior to this new era, shared facilities typically consisted of one electric utility, one telephone company line, and one cable TV line. Pole materials and standard construction practices used prior to this new era were not originally designed to meet the clearance or structural strength requirements that these additional wires impose upon them. AEP chose to establish new processes requiring a careful evaluation to determine if these existing lines could meet structural strength and clearance requirements. The Telecommunications Act empowers a pole owner to ensure that installations of additional wires and cables do not cause degradation of the existing lines, and it allows the owner to recover the cost associated with making such an evaluation. In addition, it allows for the recovery of the costs associated with improving these lines to the point necessary to safely accommodate these additional wires.
By 1998, however, the sheer number of telecommunication companies, along with the magnitude of their expansion, had over-taxed the clerical and engineering resources of AEP Columbus Region so that timely completion of such evaluations and make-ready work orders was becoming increasingly difficult. AEP made efforts to solve this problem by hiring additional resources to keep up with both the clerical and the engineering work required. This work focused primarily on solving clearance issues and the creation of work orders associated with the make-ready requests. Even so, by November of 1998 AEP was having difficulty complying with the 45-day response requirements (as set forth in the Telecom Act), and a significant backlog of attachment requests was developing.
