Make Ready Process Guide

Make ready usually stalls in small places: a permit nobody filed, an estimate nobody approved, a transfer nobody scheduled. On a large build those small waits stack up into months. We do engineering for large attachers and for large pole owners, so our engineers spend their weeks inside application queues from both directions and see where work stops moving on each side.

This post covers the make ready process the same way our Make Ready Process Guide does. Firms working for attachers have ten steps and firms working for pole owners have eight. Each step has its FCC timeline and the bottlenecks where work usually stops. The 57 tips come from three places: a recent interview with our team about the pole attachment process, practices we've written about on our site, and the current federal rules checked against 47 CFR 1.1411 and 1.1412. Every tip is in this post, and if you want the two printable roadmaps (one for each side of the application) on the wall, you can download the full Make Ready Process Guide and both roadmaps.

If you're an OSP engineering consultant running fixed-price make ready work, Part 1 is written for you. If you manage broadband engineering for an attacher, Part 1 shows where your consultant's schedule depends on decisions only you can make. If you run joint use for a pole owner, Part 2 follows your side of the queue. Pole owners carry most of the federal deadlines and still have to keep the grid safe while doing it. If you're new to the basics, our guide to what make ready is and what drives its cost is the place to start.

FCC Make Ready Timelines by Order Size

The table below shows the federal clocks as amended by the FCC's Fifth Report and Order (FCC 25-38), effective May 7, 2026. Days are calendar days unless marked as business days.[2][4]

Orders larger than the lesser of 6,000 poles or 10% of an owner's poles in a state are negotiated in good faith. The owner may also take 15 extra days on power space make ready if it says so in its notice.[2]

A Note on the Clocks

The federal timelines apply only to poles under FCC jurisdiction. According to the Congressional Research Service (R48992, June 2026), which cites the FCC's most recent list from June 2022, 23 states and the District of Columbia have certified that they regulate pole attachments and set their own rules: Alaska, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, DC, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia. Section 224 doesn't cover electric cooperatives, municipal utilities or railroads, although co-ops and municipal utilities that take BEAD money as subgrantees pick up federal-style obligations for those builds.[1] Before you plan around a number in the table, confirm which clock governs each pole owner on the route. Our post on what changed in the FCC pole attachment timelines in 2026 covers the new rules in more detail.

Part 1: Working for Attachers

When you work for an attacher, most of the job is managing someone else's timeline. The tips in this part help you see the slow stretches coming and keep your own steps from adding to them. The attacher roadmap has ten steps: evaluate permit processes and existing agreements, preliminary data collection for route determination, submit applications, application feedback and resubmission, data collection and engineering, make ready estimates and payment, power make ready construction, foreign communications make ready or self-help, finalize right-of-way permits, then attach, document and close out.

Set the Job Up Before the First Flag (Steps 1 to 3)

There's no bottleneck flag on these steps. Even so, most of what goes wrong later gets decided here.

01. Sort pole owners by whose rules apply. Investor-owned utilities in the 27 states without their own rules follow the FCC timeline, and the 23 states and DC set their own. Co-ops and municipal utilities aren't covered by Section 224 unless they take BEAD money as subgrantees, and railroads aren't covered at all, which means one footprint can run on three clocks.[1]

02. Start attachment agreements alongside route planning. Until an agreement covers rates, terms and conditions, the owner can deviate from the federal deadlines before it offers an estimate.[2] NTIA's BEAD guidance says pole attachment agreements may take months from start to finish and lets provisional subgrantees begin negotiating them early.[3]

03. Learn each owner's application spec before the first crew rolls. Some owners want a full survey and others want pole locations only. The data varies too: location ID, height, class and species, existing attachments and their heights, and sometimes proposed make ready or the last-inspected date. Capture all of it in one pass, because on fixed-price work the second trip comes out of your margin.

04. Give notice on big builds, then use the meet-and-confer. Mid-Sized Orders that are part of a single network deployment need 15 days' written notice. Large Orders need 60 days' notice and a meet-and-confer within 30 days.[2] The FCC suggests the meeting cover contractor availability, pole priorities, local permitting and timelines,[4] which is most of your risk list in one conversation.

05. Price the whole iceberg. The pole replacement in the estimate is the part you can see. Surveys, rideouts, reviews, engineering revisions and construction coordination sit below the waterline and are often the bigger share of the spend.[5] Bid from route-level data so that a handful of expensive poles doesn't hide inside a per-pole average.

Bottleneck 1: Third-Party Permits (Steps 1 to 9)

FCC timelines stop at the pole owner. DOT right-of-way permits, railroad crossings, municipal permits and private easements move at whatever pace the issuer sets. In our experience they're the biggest source of delay between deciding to enter a market and starting construction.

06. Make permit risk a survey deliverable. One pole can need four or five permits. Have the preliminary survey flag every pole that will need one, so the permit list starts the day the survey ends.

"Any kind of pole that requires multiple permits can delay your full build by months, and so that's the type of thing in a preliminary survey you're looking to try to avoid wherever possible."

Alex D'Amico, Katapult Engineering

07. File the day you see the need, and give every permit one owner. That means one named person who follows the permit to the end. You want denials early enough to redesign, and approvals arriving around the same time as the pole owner's.

08. Watch for anchors on private property. Dead-ending tension means a new anchor, possibly in someone's front yard. Anchors are the hardest permit triggers to spot from the road, and a denied easement can change both the design and the route.

09. Route around rail where you can. Railroads aren't covered by federal pole attachment rules. At the February 2026 INCOMPAS Policy Summit, Ben Sanborn, senior counsel at Conterra Networks, said it can take 12 to 15 months just to get a response from a railroad, and that the permit can cost tens of thousands of dollars, with about $5,000 just to submit the application.[6] If a crossing can't be avoided, file it first.

10. Confirm construction permits before the crew mobilizes. Right-of-way permits for construction crews are a separate list from pole owner approval, so check that every one is final before trucks roll.

In Katapult Pro: Guys and anchors are proposed as part of the attachment design, and Pre-Design from Office lets you draft a route from aerial imagery and Street View before crews roll.

Bottleneck 2: Resubmittal Loops (Step 4)

Completeness reviews take 10 business days, then 5 more for each resubmission. Owner engineers can also push back on the route during the survey window. Every loop adds calendar time to the build.

11. Build to the written spec, owner by owner. A complete application is whatever the owner's master agreement or published requirements say it is.[2] Keep a short checklist for each owner and run every package against it before submission.

12. Track completeness loops and route loops separately. A completeness loop usually means the package didn't match the spec. A route loop (add this pole, drop that one) means you and the owner read the field differently. A photo everyone can see settles a route loop faster than another site visit.

13. Stage large deployments on purpose. For projects with thousands of poles, staged submissions work better than one massive batch.[5] The owner can treat applications filed within 30 days of each other as one request, which changes the order size and the clock.[2]

14. If you use OTMR, split the work and keep the poles together. Cherry-picking simple poles into their own one-touch application leaves the rest of the job stuck waiting on complex design.[7] Our team splits the work by type and keeps the poles together: we submit regular attachment requests for poles that need complex work, then submit the whole line as an OTMR application for the simple communications-space moves. OTMR covers only simple communications space work, and the owner can object to anything it considers complex.[2] Our post on how to make one-touch make ready work walks through both versions of this approach.

15. Get a self-help contractor approved before you need one. Self-help surveys require an approved contractor and three business days' notice. Owners now have 30 days to answer a contractor approval request, and silence counts as approval, so send the request at the start of the job.[2]

Bottleneck 3: Payments (Step 6)

The owner owes an estimate within 14 days, or 29 on a Large Order. There's no federal deadline for accepting or paying it, and the make ready clock doesn't start until payment arrives.

16. Decide who approves make ready spend before the first estimate. Name the approver at kickoff and route estimates straight to that person.

"Oftentimes, even when applicants say that things need to move quickly, they're not on top of the payments, and sometimes they'll wait several months to decide whether they want to pay for a given application or not."

Alex D'Amico, Katapult Engineering

17. Ask for pole-by-pole estimates and check them against your survey. You're entitled to a pole-by-pole estimate with documentation behind every charge. The owner can't charge you to fix noncompliance created by someone else's earlier work.[2] In the FCC's first accelerated-docket ruling, Comcast v. Appalachian Power, the Commission held that a new attacher pays only the incremental cost of a taller or stronger pole when the pole already had violations.[8]

18. Pay engineering invoices quickly to hold your place in line. In one-touch workflows we've seen work, paying the engineering invoice for complex poles secures the attacher's place in the queue.[7]

19. Track acceptance and payment like an owner deadline. Dominion Energy Virginia data quoted in the FCC's Fifth Report and Order shows that over a six-month window, new attachers took an average of 61 days to accept make ready estimates and another 89 days to pay.[9] Measure estimate-to-acceptance and acceptance-to-payment on every application so that time shows up as yours.

Bottleneck 4: Pole Replacements (Steps 2, 5 and 7)

When an owner misses a federal deadline, the rules usually give the attacher a way forward. Pole replacements are the exception: the rule doesn't allow self-help for them, so the owner's construction schedule becomes your schedule.[2]

20. Survey before you apply, even when the owner doesn't require it. A preliminary survey stops short of loading analysis and power space work. Its job is to find poles so hard to get onto that you'd rather reroute around the street.

"For the attachers specifically, though, we found that the ones who are most successful are the ones that do any kind of preliminary survey themselves, whether the pole owner requires it or not."

Alex D'Amico, Katapult Engineering

21. Measure the poles that matter. An experienced make ready engineer driving the route will call most of it right. What they miss are replacements driven by angles and loading, because those don't show from the street.

22. Screen routes for replacement clusters early. A preferred route with a dozen or more replacements can run into six figures of make ready before any fiber goes up.[5] Spot clusters while you can still pick another street or go underground.

23. Photograph existing conditions before anyone argues about them. Cost disputes come down to what the new attachment caused and what was already wrong, and timestamped photos and field data are your best protection.[5] An owner can't deny access over a preexisting violation you didn't cause.[2]

24. Know your replacement rate by owner. In New York, the DPS Staff White Paper found that from 2018 through 2021 new attachments required a pole replacement about 7% of the time at NYSEG and 9% at National Grid, and that attachers ended up paying for a replacement about 3% of the time at NYSEG and 8% at National Grid.[10] Your own numbers from past footprints, broken out by owner, are the ones to bid with.

In Katapult Pro: Break Angle Measurement helps dial in design, Make Ready Heatmaps show make ready violations and complexity across a whole route, and our integrated loading engine shows results in real time, with pole models available to export to SPIDAcalc and O-Calc Pro. See Engineering Design in Katapult Pro.

Pole replacements are where most make ready schedules slip, and they're the one step an attacher can't self-help. Both roadmaps in the guide mark where replacements get called on each side of the application, so your team can plan around them before the estimate lands. Download the make ready roadmaps or book a call with our engineers to walk through a route you're scoping now.

Bottleneck 5: Stalled Transfers (Step 8)

Once the owner sends make ready notices, existing attachers get 30, 75 or 120 days to move. The federal rule makes coordinating them the new attacher's job.[2] When transfers stall, the old pole stays up next to the new one.

25. Track transfers per pole, per attacher. Status at the application level hides the one attacher holding up twelve poles.[5]

26. Send transfer requests to a person who can schedule a crew. A request that lands in a distribution list tends to sit there until someone decides it's theirs, and a named scheduler can put a truck on the calendar the same day.

27. Use the 15-day notice and self-help when you need them. Existing attachers that can't make the date must say so within 15 days. From that notice, or once the deadline passes, you can self-help with an approved contractor on five days' notice.[2] Getting there takes time, so keep the contractor ready.

"So there is a process for it, but it is kind of messy going through the process and red tape to get that set up."

Alex D'Amico, Katapult Engineering

28. Use one-touch make ready where the work is simple and the process works. One approved contractor doing the simple moves in one visit means you aren't waiting on each existing attacher in turn.[7] Under the federal rule, the owner reviews an OTMR application on its merits in 15, 30 or 45 days, and you give 15 days' notice before work starts.[2] If you want to hear how successful OTMR programs are set up, book a call with our team.

Closing Out Cleanly (Step 10)

There's no flag on closeout, but this is where the record for the next job gets made.

29. Build only what's in the application. CenterPoint's guidelines say a job with attachments that weren't permitted fails the post-installation inspection. Every attachment on that job is then treated as unauthorized, and the attacher pays for the inspection and each follow-up inspection after remediation.[11]

30. Notify and fix on the rule's clock. After OTMR or self-help work, notify the owner and existing attachers within 15 days. The owner gets at least 90 days to inspect and 14 days to report problems with documentation, and you have 14 days to fix them.[2] Our post on post-construction inspections covers what that inspection looks for.

31. Plan crews from the make ready release date. There's no federal deadline yet for attaching after make ready is complete, but the FCC has asked for comment on requiring deployment within 120 days.[9] An owner that rushed make ready and then watched the poles sit empty will remember it on your next application.

32. Hand back as-builts that match the field. On BEAD-funded builds, the as-built is the record your client's reporting depends on. It also becomes part of the owner's attachment record for the next job.

Part 2: Working for Pole Owners

Most of the federal clock sits on the owner's side, so most deadlines are yours to meet on the owner's behalf. Meanwhile, applications arrive in batches you usually can't predict. The pole owner roadmap has eight steps: notice and planning for Large Order projects, application intake and completeness review, data collection and design, construction estimate, payment, notices and power make ready construction, communications make ready and new attachment installation, then post-construction inspection and closeout.

Bottleneck 1: Large Order and Batch Submissions (Steps 1 and 2)

Big builds tend to arrive all at once. The 2026 rules give owners some warning.

33. Turn advance notice into a capacity plan. The meet-and-confer happens within 30 days of a Large Order notice. Bring real numbers to it: survey and design capacity, availability of power space contractors, which poles to prioritize, and the state of local permitting.[4]

34. Flag no-notice applications right away. An owner can treat an application filed without the required notice as the notice itself, so the timeline doesn't start until the notice period ends. That option holds only if the owner tells the attacher promptly.[2]

35. Count batches the way the rule does. Applications from the same attacher within 30 days can be treated as one request. Owners can't combine size limits and frequency limits in a way that throttles how many attachments an attacher can seek.[2]

36. Keep the spec current and list every gap the first time. An application that meets an outdated published spec is complete. A rejection must list every reason, and a resubmission only has to address those reasons. If the owner doesn't answer within 10 business days, the application is complete.[2]

37. Answer contractor requests inside 30 days. Silence after 30 days counts as approval. A denial must be written, nondiscriminatory and grounded in safety or reliability.[2]

In Katapult Pro: Attachers submit through the owner's customer-facing portal. With the owner's standards hosted in Katapult Pro, contractors design to the current spec instead of the version they last downloaded. See Joint Use Management in Katapult Pro.

Bottleneck 2: Complex Power Make Ready, Pole Replacements and Limited Construction Resources (Step 3)

Data collection and design is where complex power make ready and replacements get called, and the owner's construction capacity decides how fast they get built. The attacher can't self-help a replacement, so every call your firm makes sets the schedule for that pole.

38. Keep engineering decisions in the office. Our field crews capture photos and calibrated height measurements, and the engineering calls happen afterward in the office with time, context and software.[12] Two engineers reviewing the same pole are looking at the same record. The Katapult Method explains how that office-field split works.

39. Separate what the new attacher caused from what was already there. The owner can't deny access over a preexisting violation the new attacher didn't cause, and can't charge the attacher to fix one.[2] A photo record makes that line defensible, especially after Comcast v. Appalachian Power.[8]

40. Calibrate your make ready calls. An aggressive call might save money and get rejected, while an overly conservative one adds cost nobody needed.[5] When reviewers make consistent calls based on the owner's written standards, neither side has to relitigate every pole.

41. Write denials the way the rule reads them. A denial should be specific and backed by evidence tied to capacity, safety, reliability or generally applicable engineering standards.[1] A short, documented denial tends to close a dispute, while a vague one usually opens one.

42. Adopt a good OTMR survey instead of repeating it. The owner can adopt the attacher's OTMR survey and notify affected attachers within 15 days.[2] That saves a truck roll and a few weeks.

43. Keep the approved contractor list long enough to use. Owners must keep a reasonably sufficient, up-to-date list of contractors authorized for self-help surveys and for complex and power space make ready.[2]

44. Say early when construction capacity won't cover the work. If the owner can't meet a make ready deadline, it must tell the new attacher within 15 days of payment, and the attacher can then elect self-help.[2] An early, honest notice gives both sides time to plan around a capacity problem.

Bottleneck 3: Unpaid Estimates (Step 5)

Once the estimate goes out, nothing moves until the attacher pays. This is one of the most common places applications get stuck, and some never move again.

45. Send estimates the attacher can check. When asked, estimates go pole by pole. Fixed costs that can't be split are shown per job, and every charge has documentation. The final invoice follows the same format.[2]

46. Give waiting-on-payment its own status. On a queue report, an unpaid estimate looks exactly like owner delay. Dominion Energy Virginia data quoted in the FCC's Fifth Report and Order shows that over a six-month window, new attachers took an average of 61 days to accept make ready estimates and 89 more days to pay.[9]

47. Use the 14-day withdrawal on purpose. The owner can withdraw an unpaid estimate after 14 days.[2] Decide ahead of time when you'll use that option, so the decision isn't made one application at a time.

48. Invoice complex engineering early. In one-touch workflows that have worked in our footprint, the owner's contractor invoices complex engineering up front, and paying that invoice secures the attacher's place in line.[7]

In Katapult Pro: Timeline Tracking measures each application against FCC and state deadlines, and data tracking records dates and dollars in the background. Once waiting on payment is set up as its own stage, it stops hiding inside the owner's averages.

Bottleneck 4: Permits for the Pole Owner's Make Ready (Steps 3 to 6)

Pole sets on state roads and municipal work need permits, and none of them run on the federal clock.

49. File the owner's permits early. Eversource told Massachusetts regulators that MassDOT permits for pole replacements can delay work by a few months, and railroad, subway and wetlands permits by about six months or more.[13] File when the design is final, well before the crew is scheduled.

50. Send make ready notices the day payment lands. Each notice must say where make ready will happen and what it involves, and must set the completion date. It must also say existing attachers may modify their attachments before that date and name a contact person. For power space work, it should mention the owner's right to 15 more days. The new attacher gets copies of the notices and the existing attachers' contact information.[2]

51. Deviate in writing, and only for as long as you must. The owner can miss a deadline for good and sufficient cause. It must tell attachers right away, in writing, listing the affected poles, the reason and the new completion date.[2]

52. Sequence construction from a view of the whole job. A map showing simple and complex make ready across the route helps project managers sequence construction, set realistic timelines and budget.[5]

Bottleneck 5: Double Wood (Steps 7 and 8)

Chasing transfers is the new attacher's job. When transfers stall, though, the leftover pole stands on the owner's plant and blocks the next application on it.

53. Keep a record of who's holding each pole. Massachusetts law requires transfers and removal of the old pole within 90 days. Even so, Verizon's semi-annual double pole report counted 22,066 double poles across eight utilities as of October 31, 2025, up from 20,883 on May 1, 2025, and up 5,726 statewide since 2020; Eversource alone reported 5,329 as of October 31, 2025.[14] Our guide to double wood utility poles and how to resolve them covers the record-keeping side.

54. Push simple moves to one-touch make ready. Fewer separate crews means fewer old poles left standing while each attacher waits its turn.[7]

55. Inspect on time, with documentation. After OTMR or self-help work, the owner gets at least 90 days to inspect and 14 days to report problems. It can then fix the problems and bill reasonable costs, or require the attacher to fix them within 14 days.[2] Inspection is where the attachment record gets reconciled and where unauthorized attachments come to light.

Running the Program (All Steps)

At larger utilities, the steps often belong to separate teams, and most of the time lost on the owner's side is lost in handoffs between them.

56. Put a name on every handoff. Intake, data collection, design, permits and invoicing should each hand off to a named person, with the applicable clock (FCC, state or contract) visible to everyone.

57. Notify only when someone has something to do. Email alerts help because most people aren't in a joint use portal every day. They backfire when they arrive fifty a day or go to a shared inbox.

"Don't be sending emails for every single status change because it's just noise for a lot of them. Send updates that are actionable to the right people."

Alex D'Amico, Katapult Engineering

In Katapult Pro: Application Workflow Management handles configurable stages, automated routing and clear handoffs, and attachers can see where each application stands without emailing anyone to ask.

Frequently Asked Questions About the Make Ready Process

What is the make ready process?

The make ready process is the sequence of steps that prepares a utility pole to safely take a new attachment. It runs from application and completeness review through survey and engineering, the cost estimate and payment, then make ready construction by the pole owner and existing attachers, the new attachment, and post-construction inspection. Make ready work can be as small as raising a communications cable or as large as replacing the pole.

How long does the make ready process take under FCC rules?

For a Regular Order, the owner-side clocks add up to about 100 days for communications space make ready. That's 10 business days for completeness, 45 days for the survey, 14 for the estimate and 30 for construction. Power space make ready runs closer to six months, because construction gets 90 days plus an optional 15. The time the attacher takes to accept and pay comes on top of that, since payment has no federal deadline. Mid-Sized and Large Orders get longer survey and construction windows.

What are the FCC make ready timelines for Regular, Mid-Sized and Large Orders?

Surveys take 45, 60 or 90 days. Estimates take 14, 14 or 29 days. Communications space make ready takes 30, 75 or 120 days, and power space make ready takes 90, 135 or 180 days. Mid-Sized Orders that are part of a single network deployment need 15 days' advance notice. Large Orders need 60 days' notice and a meet-and-confer within 30 days.

Do FCC pole attachment rules apply to every pole owner?

No. The federal rules cover investor-owned utilities and telephone companies in the states that haven't certified their own regulation. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia set their own rules. Electric cooperatives, municipal utilities and railroads aren't covered by Section 224, although co-ops and municipal utilities that take BEAD funding as subgrantees pick up obligations for those builds.

What is one-touch make ready (OTMR)?

One-touch make ready lets a new attacher use one approved contractor to perform all simple communications space make ready on a pole in a single visit, instead of waiting for each existing attacher to move its own facilities. The owner reviews an OTMR application on its merits in 15, 30 or 45 days depending on order size, and can object to any work it considers complex. Complex and power space work still goes through the standard process.

Who pays for make ready when a pole already has violations?

The new attacher generally pays for make ready its attachment causes. It can't be charged to fix violations created by someone else's earlier work. In Comcast v. Appalachian Power (February 2026), the FCC held that a new attacher pays only the incremental cost of a taller or stronger pole when the pole was already out of compliance.

What can an attacher do if a deadline is missed?

If the owner misses the survey or estimate deadline, or an existing attacher misses its make ready date, the new attacher can generally use self-help with an approved contractor. The same applies once the owner or existing attacher sends a 15-day notice saying it can't meet the deadline. Self-help is not available for pole replacements, which is why replacement-heavy routes carry the most schedule risk.

Why do pole attachment applications get stuck after the estimate?

The make ready clock doesn't start until the attacher pays, and there's no federal deadline for paying. Dominion Energy Virginia data quoted in the FCC's Fifth Report and Order shows that over a six-month window, new attachers took an average of 61 days to accept make ready estimates and 89 more days to pay. Naming an approver at kickoff and tracking waiting-on-payment as its own stage keeps that time visible to both sides.

What is double wood, and why does it matter for make ready?

Double wood is an old pole left standing next to its replacement because one or more attachers haven't transferred their facilities. It matters for make ready because the leftover pole blocks the next application on that location. Massachusetts alone had 22,066 double poles across eight utilities as of October 31, 2025, up from 20,883 six months earlier, according to Verizon's semi-annual report.

We'd Love to Help

We built Katapult Pro for our own engineering work before we sold it to anyone, and our engineers still use it on attacher and pole owner projects every week. If one of these bottlenecks sounds like the one slowing you down, bring a footprint or a queue you're working now. We'll look at it with you and tell you honestly whether Katapult Pro would help.

Book a call with our engineers to walk through your make ready backlog. If you'd rather work through it on your own first, get the Make Ready Process Guide, which puts every step, clock and bottleneck flag for both sides on a single page.

Sources

1. 47 U.S.C. § 224 and 47 CFR § 1.1403(b). State certification count: Congressional Research Service, Pole Attachments in Broadband Deployment: Selected Issues (R48992, June 2026), citing FCC public notice DA 22-630.
2. 47 CFR §§ 1.1411 and 1.1412, as amended by the FCC Fifth Report and Order (FCC 25-38), effective May 7, 2026 (FCC Wireline Competition Bureau public notice DA 26-446, May 7, 2026).
3. NTIA, Accelerating the Construction of BEAD Projects (cover dated December 2024; reposted August 2025), "Negotiation for Rights of Way and Pole Attachment," p. 4.
4. FCC, Small Entity Compliance Guide for the Fifth Report and Order, DA 26-378 (April 16, 2026).
5. Katapult Engineering, "What Is Make Ready? Costs, Safety & Pole Attachment Basics."
6. Broadband Breakfast Live Online at the INCOMPAS Policy Summit, February 4, 2026, remarks by Ben Sanborn, Senior Counsel, Conterra Networks.
7. Katapult Engineering, "How to make one-touch make ready work."
8. FCC, Comcast Cable Communications, LLC v. Appalachian Power Company, first Rapid Broadband Assessment Team accelerated-docket decision, February 5, 2026.
9. FCC 25-38, Fifth Report and Order and Fourth Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (July 2025).
10. New York PSC Case 22-M-0101, DPS Staff White Paper on Review of Certain Pole Attachment Rules (December 18, 2023).
11. CenterPoint Energy, Pole Attachment Guidelines and Procedures (2025 revision), Sections 8, 9 and 11.
12. Katapult Engineering, "The Katapult Method: Photo-Based Pole Data Collection Guide."
13. NSTAR Electric Company d/b/a Eversource Energy, Initial Comments, Massachusetts D.P.U. 25-10 / D.T.C. 25-1 (March 18, 2025), response to Section B, Question 11.
14. Seth G. Parker, comments in Massachusetts D.P.U. 26-10 / D.T.C. 26-1 (2026), citing Verizon's semi-annual double pole report; M.G.L. c. 164, § 34B.

Figures from regulatory proceedings mostly come from parties arguing one side, so treat them as a sign of direction rather than industry averages. Quotes are from a November 2026 interview with our team.