A friend and I once decided to look into how much it costs to lease the communications space on public utility poles. This is the space well below the power li

A friend and I once decided to look into how much it costs to lease the communications space on public utility poles. This is the space well below the power lines that the cable and telephone companies lease from your local government. Read more here: http://www.annsgarden.com/poles/poles.htm http://www.annsgarden.com/poles/poles.htm Truth is, almost nobody at the local level has any idea how one could go about doing this. Even though they are publicly owned poles and communications companies pay rent to use them, the cities have no mechanism on how to actually rent pole space to any company other than the phone company and the cable company. I think we could see a resurgence of local ISPs and even metropolitan area networks if city governments would take up this one issue -- open up the utility polls to more companies and publish the rental rates for the poles. As a bonus, they could even earn more tax proceeds.