Re: Conduit Lease/IRU Pricing

[James Jun <james.jun () towardex com>]

On Sun, Feb 05, 2023 at 12:36:27PM -0800, William Herrin wrote:
> One quick note: conduit on private property, such as the tail of a
> telco conduit serving a small office complex, is almost always a
> fixture of the property belonging to whoever owns the land. Even
> though the telco installed it for free. It's just too expensive for
> them to dot the i's and cross the t's legally when installing the
> conduit tail, so they generally just do it realizing there's low odds
> of anyone hijacking it from them.

This is an important point that does come up.  In commercial property installations, telcos often choose to look over 
this just like you stated--since they control the mainline system out in the street anyway, they feel that provides 
enough of security and not enough of a concern to lose sleep over it.

However, in valuable multi-tenant facilities (carrier hotels, data centers, and large commercial/urban developer 
projects), you will also find that telecom carriers can, and often will, absolutely enforce their rights to their 
conduit systems (including tails) being placed upon private property.  Access and Easement Agreements are frequently 
used to enforce the purpose of the wayleave for large telecom installations occuring upon private property.  Therefore, 
it is important to contact the property owner and the owner of the wayleave (i.e. carrier owning the conduit system on 
private property) for permission/license to enter, and never assume that just because a conduit is in private property 
and the landlord thinks you're ok, yo're good to go.  More often than not, it is not ok, and you will likely end up 
getting nasty surprises from the said carrier's legal department, when they decide to enforce their rights.

This happened to a large Tier-1 carrier who was pulling fiber into a new developer project here.  The property owner 
told them it was ok to use the conduit, and all of the manholes were simply labeled 'FIBER OPTIC' engraved on them, so 
the carrier thought they had permission to pull fiber.  They never realized that the ILEC had an easement agreement and 
those conuits and manholes were paid for by the ILEC for installation.  Their fiber cable was discovered about a week 
later when ILEC crews were working to pull their own cable in-- the rest is hitory, they had to make amends to obtain 
proper authorization and pay fees, etc. after being discovered.  After this happened, the ILEC also replaced all 
manhole covers in the property with their name and logo engraved on them.

James