So the state public utilities commission is studying the issue and considering what data should be collected. It might sound like a mundane issue, but top state officials don't see it that way.
"I never thought three years ago that I would have interest and the concern about the topic of poles and conduit that I do today," Michael Picker, California Public Utilities Commission president, said on Friday during a daylong workshop in San Francisco.
As Picker explained, the convergence of the telecom and electric industries has made poles and conduit "contested real estate because as they get congested there's a lot of folks who want access to them, including the new 5G technologies [that] require many more nodes than general wireless cellular services, and therefore have to have access to these poles."
Picker said he thinks the state doesn't have a good handle on data about the location, condition and ownership of power poles and conduits, and the equipment installed on them.
Much of the information today is located within siloed and standalone or regional databases and spreadsheets maintained by utility companies, which own many of the poles and lease space on them to other companies. Southern California Edison, for example, uses three primary databases: One called the Southern California Joint Pole Committee Database, the second is SAP and the third is a commercial off-the-shelf product. This apparently is common. Representatives from PG&E and AT&T described how they use multiple databases of their own.
A director in PG&E's electric operations department told CPUC on Friday that having a "single source of truth" would be great to have. Utility companies spend a great deal of time today verifying data and sending information to one another through the postal "snail" mail. A single database could conceivably eliminate that tedious legwork.
"I think it would be welcomed as long as everyone uses it and there's timely information on that data, and some governance on it," the PG&E official said.
Elizaveta Malashenko, director of CPUC's Safety and Enforcement Division, said there are about 4 million poles in California. She said one of the commission's responsibilities is to ensure that the poles remain safe and don't become overloaded and become a safety hazard for workers. Another motivator for CPUC is market access, whether for electric companies, telcos, wireless or commercial mobile radio service providers.
"We're increasingly getting more and more requests of different types of entities who want to attach to poles, and this is a market fairness question. We want to promote competition here in California. We want to make sure that those who need to attach to poles have equal access and that this whole process is as transparent and painless as it can be so that everybody can benefit form all the services entities are trying to provide," Malashenko said.
CPUC is considering doing a rulemaking on pole access at a future date, Malashenko said.
In 2014 CPUC wrote a white paper explaining how utility poles are managed and regulated. The document summarizes:
California Public Utilities Code (PU Code) gives the Commission the authority to allow public utilities to use the utility poles, ducts, conduits, and rights of way of other public utilities, and the Commission requires investor-owned utilities (IOUs; i.e., PG&E, SCE, SDG&E) and incumbent local exchange carriers (e.g., Verizon, AT&T) to provide telecommunications and cable TV providers with access to their utility poles, ducts, conduits and rights of way.
