Make-Ready Engineering Disputes: What Actually Slows Your Project
The five practical patterns that stall US fibre builds — application-completeness fights, cost battles over pole replacements, existing-attacher stalls, the OTMR 'complex' default, and the line-angle trap — with the playbook for each.
Make-ready disputes rarely reach a courtroom. Most of them get resolved in the resubmission cycle, in an email argument between engineers, or in a quiet delay that eats your project schedule until somebody gives up. Recognising the pattern early is worth more than knowing the case law.
If you’re deploying fibre in the US and touching third-party poles, this article covers the five patterns that actually stall real projects — what each one looks like, why it happens, and what you can do about it. Legal and regulatory detail is threaded in where useful, but the article’s written from the perspective of “you’ve filed and something’s gone wrong” rather than “here’s what the FCC ruled.”
The five patterns that actually stall your project
1. The application-completeness fight
You submitted the application five weeks ago. The 148-day clock is meant to be running. This morning the utility replied — the application is incomplete, and until it’s complete, the clock hasn’t started.
This is the single most common way projects lose weeks silently. Utilities have every incentive to reject applications for detail-level flaws, because completeness is what starts the timeline. PG&E requires an Exhibit A, pole loading calculations, make-ready forms, marked utility maps, and intrusive inspection data for every pole in the batch, emailed to a specific address, meeting California General Order 95 — not just NESC. FirstEnergy requires 8-megapixel photos from multiple angles and transmission-organisation sign-off before the survey even starts. AT&T’s CLEC Online forms change without notice, and their own guidance explicitly warns not to save them locally. Verizon caps applications at ≤200 poles and ≤2,000 pending per Planning Manager’s Area. Lumen mandates Alden ONE as the intake system for everyone.
What to do: Build a per-owner template before you file, and get someone who’s done that specific owner’s process before to sanity-check the pack. Never submit the same application format across multiple owners and expect all of them to accept it.
2. The cost fight over pole replacement
The survey came back. Twelve poles need replacing — three because of your added load, nine because they were already rotten or out of clearance. The utility wants you to pay 100% of all twelve.
This is the single most-litigated dispute in the space. Section 224 of the Communications Act embodies “cost causation” — the party that causes the cost pays. In practice utilities have historically pushed 100% of every replacement onto the new attacher, even for poles that were already going to have to be replaced. Attachers push back that they should be paying only the incremental cost — the difference between the pole the utility was going to replace anyway and the pole they now need.
The recent precedent settled most of that argument. Comcast v Appalachian Power, FCC Order 26-6 (released 5 February 2026, Docket EB-25-MD-002), held that where a pole was already out of compliance because of a pre-existing violation caused by a third party, the new attacher pays only the incremental cost of a taller or stronger pole — not the full replacement. The FCC used a worked example inside the order to make it concrete: a compliant 45-foot pole would cost $5,000; the 50-foot pole needed to also accommodate the new attacher costs $5,500; the new attacher pays $500 — the incremental amount. The order rests on Section 224 of the Communications Act and Rules 1.1408(b) and 1.1411(e)(4), and cites the older Kansas City Cable precedent as its through-line.
What to do: Document your incremental cost position from the field survey, before you file. If a pole is already failing structurally, get that in writing at the time you inspect it. When the utility bills you for full replacement, you should have the evidence to challenge in the same week — not months later after the argument has ossified.
There’s a related — much older — precedent for the situation where your survey turns up somebody else’s non-compliant cable, not yours. Kansas City Cable Partners v Kansas City Power & Light (1999) established that the violator pays, not the new attacher. That hasn’t stopped utilities trying to bundle those fixes into new-attacher bills, but the precedent is firm.
3. Existing-attacher stalls
Your make-ready plan requires an existing attacher to move their own cable to make space for yours. They’ve quoted you $40,000 to do it. Or they’ve said they’ll get to it in nine months. Or they haven’t responded at all.
This is the coordination problem, and it happens because the existing attacher is usually your competitor. They have no incentive to move fast or price fairly. There are FCC self-help remedies — you can hire an approved contractor to do the transfer under specific circumstances — but invoking them is difficult in practice. Verizon removed roughly 13,000 old poles in Massachusetts in 2021 alone, most of which had been coordination failures that eventually caught up.
What to do: Build the coordination time into your baseline schedule. The 148-day clock is a theoretical minimum. On projects with meaningful existing-attacher work, 200–300 days is a more honest planning number — Verizon’s Massachusetts data showed 218-day averages for jobs with no pole replacements and 313 days where replacements were needed. Anything faster than that is a bonus, not a plan.
4. The “complex” default
You submitted for OTMR — one-touch make-ready, the mechanism that lets a new attacher hire a single approved contractor to do all “simple” communications-space work in one visit. The utility says no: the work is complex, not simple, so OTMR doesn’t apply. You get pushed back into the sequential process where each existing attacher handles their own transfer at their own pace.
When work could plausibly be either simple or complex, the pole owner will call it complex. AEP and APCO explicitly say OTMR is granted only for simple make-ready “and where no other make-ready is required” — meaning if any part of the job is complex, none of it qualifies. All wireless is complex by definition. All splicing is complex. Pole replacement is always complex. On aged rural multi-attacher lines most of the work isn’t OTMR-eligible.
What to do: Where you have a genuine case that a specific piece of work is simple, be prepared to defend it — the default won’t help you. Where possible, segment your submissions so the simple work flows through OTMR while the complex work runs sequentially. Don’t rely on OTMR as a schedule input for aged infrastructure.
5. The line-angle trap
The field survey looks fine. The pole loading calculation says the pole can take your attachment. The application goes in. Then the utility comes back and says the guy and anchor need replacing because the line angle at this pole is greater than 5 degrees, and your added tension pushes the existing anchor beyond its safe limit.
This is the quietest of the five. A new attachment at a pole with a line angle over about 5 degrees triggers a re-check of the anchor and guy system per NESC Rule 261. If the existing guying is inadequate — and on older infrastructure it often is — you need a new anchor and guy. That’s complex make-ready. Six to twelve additional weeks on the schedule, and cost that wasn’t in the original estimate.
What to do: Catch this in the survey stage, not in the estimate stage. Any pole with a visible line angle should be measured and its guy system inspected as part of the field walk, so the surprise doesn’t land after you’ve already committed to a timeline.
When your project crosses a state line
The FCC doesn’t have exclusive jurisdiction over pole attachments. Twenty-three states plus DC have reverse-preempted under §224(c) — they run their own rules. Your project may be under FCC rules in one jurisdiction and state PUC rules in the other, with different timelines, different OTMR scope, and different dispute resolution processes.
- New York — OTMR is unavailable on poles covered by a collective bargaining agreement. Owners must flag CBA-covered poles, so plan around that.
- Connecticut — PURA’s 2022 Single-Visit Transfer variant was upheld again in October 2024 despite union opposition.
- Louisville — the OTMR ordinance was upheld as right-of-way regulation in AT&T v Louisville, August 2017.
- Georgia — statewide OTMR for EMC poles, plus the “One Buck Deal”: $1/pole/year in unserved areas for six years, $27.71/pole/year elsewhere.
- West Virginia — OTMR by statute since 2017.
What to do: Check which rules apply on each section of your route before you file, not after a dispute has started. “FCC rules apply” is a false floor.
When you have to escalate — the FCC fast lane
Most disputes should be resolved in the resubmission cycle. When they can’t, the escalation path has changed materially in the last year, and it’s worth knowing what changed.
The Comcast/APCO case above went through the FCC’s Accelerated Docket after Comcast escalated to the FCC’s Rapid Broadband Assessment Team (RBAT) earlier in 2025 during the West Virginia PSC proceedings on APCO’s prior policy. Comcast filed the formal FCC complaint on 25 November 2025; APCO answered on 15 December; the FCC released the order on 5 February 2026 — 72 days end to end from complaint to ruling. That’s meaningfully faster than most pole-attachment fights, and the FCC’s willingness to grant Accelerated Docket assignment to BEAD-era complaints is a signal worth acting on.
Even fast-lane litigation is a nine-month exercise once you count the earlier West Virginia PSC filing (May 2025) and RBAT mediation before the FCC complaint went in. If you’re a smaller altnet, the calculation is different again. Litigation — even fast-lane litigation — is expensive. Set a threshold, in dollars and days, above which you file and below which you eat the loss. Deciding in the moment is expensive.
The playbook
Five actions that keep disputes out of your critical path:
- Know the per-owner submission format before you file. Every major pole owner publishes an attachment manual. Read it. Don’t file the same application format for AT&T and PG&E and expect either to land.
- Plan for 200–300 days, not 148. Anything faster is a bonus.
- Document your incremental cost position from the field survey. When the utility bills you 100%, have the evidence to challenge in real time.
- Know your reverse-preemption position on each route section before you file.
- Set a filing threshold before you’re in a dispute — dollars, days, or both.
None of this makes disputes go away. It moves them out of your critical path — which is, in practice, the entire fight.
LayerSpec provides make-ready engineering for US fibre builds — clearance design, pole-owner submission packages, and revisions through the FCC 148-day cycle.
Informational content, not engineering or legal advice. For project-specific decisions, consult a licensed engineer and, where the dollars justify it, pole-attachment counsel.