The CommLaw Group Represents Rural Broadband Provider in Formal FCC Complaint Challenging Pole Rates, Access Restrictions and a Regulatory Gap in Idaho
The national push to bring high-speed broadband to every American community is increasingly confronting a practical problem: building the network is not simply a question of funding fiber.
Providers still must get the fiber onto poles, across rights-of-way, through railroad corridors, past permitting authorities and into communities. And in many parts of the country, those processes remain governed by regulatory structures, contracts and practices developed long before today’s national imperative to deploy ubiquitous, high-capacity broadband infrastructure.
A new Federal Communications Commission proceeding involving Wired or Wireless, Inc. (“WOW”) and Avista Corporation brings those tensions into sharp focus.
The CommLaw Group represents WOW in the formal complaint proceeding now pending before the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau, Wired or Wireless, Inc. v. Avista Corp., Proceeding No. 26-236, Bureau ID No. EB-26-MD-005. The FCC issued its Notice of Formal Complaint on September 1, 2026.
The case concerns far more than a disputed utility bill.
A Small Rural Provider Confronts a Very Large Infrastructure Problem
WOW is an 11-employee telecommunications and broadband provider operating in portions of Idaho. The network involved in the dispute passes approximately 1,500 homes in the rural Idaho communities of Hope and Clark Fork and includes hundreds of attachments to Avista-owned utility poles, all of which existed when the company was purchased by its current owner.
According to WOW’s complaint, Avista increased WOW’s annual pole-attachment charges from approximately $7,554 to $49,053 in 2023 and subsequently demanded more than $334,000 in back billing dating to 2018. WOW also alleges that the billing included unsupported pole counts and that Avista applied a legacy telecommunications rate without demonstrating that the resulting charges complied with the applicable pole-attachment framework.
The dispute also reaches directly into network construction.
WOW alleges that Avista imposed approval, engineering, application and fee requirements (something prohibited by the FCC since 2018) when WOW sought to add additional fiber to communications facilities it already had attached to poles—a practice known as overlashing. WOW further alleges that Avista issued stop-work directives and restricted access while the billing dispute remained unresolved, without identifying safety, capacity, reliability or engineering conditions sufficient to justify those restrictions.
Avista has not yet had the opportunity to fully litigate those allegations before the Commission, and the FCC has not ruled on their merits.
But the proceeding presents an important question extending well beyond WOW and Avista:
What happens when the legal framework says broadband deployment should be facilitated, but the infrastructure owner controlling the physical pathway can effectively determine whether, when and at what cost deployment occurs?
The Idaho Jurisdictional Gap May Be the Most Important Part of the Case
The dispute also illustrates a less visible barrier to broadband construction: regulatory fragmentation.
Section 224 of the Communications Act generally gives the FCC authority over the rates, terms and conditions governing attachments to utility poles. States, however, may “reverse preempt” federal jurisdiction by certifying that they regulate pole attachments themselves.
Idaho had done so.
WOW therefore initially pursued relief before the Idaho Public Utilities Commission. According to WOW, it waited 194 days before the Idaho Commission ultimately dismissed the complaint for lack of jurisdiction.
That sequence creates the core jurisdictional issue now before the FCC: whether a state can displace federal pole-attachment jurisdiction while not providing an effective regulatory regime capable of resolving the very pole-attachment disputes that Section 224 contemplates.
The issue is particularly timely.
On June 11, 2026, the FCC’s Wireline Competition Bureau specifically reminded states that have reverse-preempted federal pole-attachment jurisdiction that they must do more than simply claim authority. They must actually regulate pole-attachment rates, terms and conditions and maintain procedures for resolving pole-access complaints.
The Commission noted that 23 states and the District of Columbia currently claim pole-attachment jurisdiction and acknowledged that ineffective or incomplete state regulation can itself impede broadband deployment.
The FCC is now considering whether changes to its certification rules are necessary to ensure that states claiming pole-attachment jurisdiction actually provide the regulatory framework required by federal law.
WOW’s complaint places that policy question into a concrete factual dispute.
Broadband Policy Is Moving Faster Than the Infrastructure Rules Beneath It
The WOW proceeding also fits within a much larger reassessment underway at the FCC.
Congress, the states and the federal government are directing tens of billions of dollars toward broadband construction. The BEAD Program alone represents approximately $42 billion in broadband infrastructure funding, and the FCC itself has emphasized that efficient pole attachment processes are critical to ensuring that those dollars actually translate into deployed networks.
Yet broadband infrastructure frequently must pass through legal and commercial systems designed decades ago for very different networks.
Pole agreements may predate modern fiber construction.
State regulatory certifications may predate the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Municipal permitting structures may have been created when network construction occurred intermittently rather than simultaneously across thousands of communities.
Railroad, utility and right-of-way agreements may contain processes poorly suited to today’s scale and pace of fiber deployment.
And infrastructure controlled by incumbent utilities, telecommunications carriers, municipalities, railroads and other property owners frequently represents a physical bottleneck that a new entrant cannot simply route around.
None of that means legitimate safety, engineering, property or cost-recovery concerns should disappear. Pole owners and governmental authorities have legitimate responsibilities for safe construction and management of infrastructure and public rights-of-way.
The policy challenge is ensuring those responsibilities do not unintentionally become barriers to competitive deployment.
The FCC Is Looking at the Problem From Multiple Directions
The Commission has increasingly focused on precisely these points of friction.
Pole-attachment reforms adopted by the FCC in 2025—and effective for significant provisions as of May 7, 2026—addressed coordination between pole owners and attachers, large pole-attachment orders, attachment timelines and contractor approval processes.
The Commission’s separate Build America: Eliminating Barriers to Wireline Deployments proceeding is examining state and local rights-of-way requirements more broadly.
There, the FCC has proposed, among other things, a presumptive 120-day timeframe for processing certain wireline right-of-way applications and limitations tying governmental fees more closely to the actual costs associated with managing those rights-of-way. The Commission cited evidence that permitting delays stretching months or years, excessive fees and additional compensation requirements can cause providers to postpone, reduce or abandon broadband construction.
State and local governments, for their part, have raised concerns that federal preemption could interfere with legitimate public-safety, infrastructure-management and local-government responsibilities.
The debate therefore is not simply about “deregulation.”
It is about modernizing the rules surrounding physical infrastructure so that legitimate oversight remains intact without allowing outdated processes, regulatory gaps or economic bottlenecks to frustrate broadband deployment.
The Cost of Friction Ultimately Shows Up Somewhere
Every unnecessary engineering review, duplicative application, disputed pole count, excessive delay, unresolved jurisdictional question or outdated rate methodology adds cost.
Eventually, someone pays for it.
Sometimes it’s the broadband provider.
Sometimes it’s the customer.
Sometimes a planned project is delayed or abandoned.
And increasingly, it may be taxpayers whose federal or state broadband dollars must subsidize construction that otherwise could have occurred through private investment.
WOW contends that the restrictions it encountered delayed broadband deployment that it was prepared to undertake using infrastructure already in place and caused projects to depend instead upon Idaho broadband grant funding.
That is what makes the broader policy implications of the proceeding significant.
The United States can devote unprecedented resources to broadband deployment. But those investments will accomplish less than intended if the legal and physical pathways necessary to construct networks remain unnecessarily difficult to navigate.
The CommLaw Group’s Broadband & Telecom Infrastructure Practice
The CommLaw Group’s representation of WOW reflects the Firm’s growing Broadband & Telecom Infrastructure practice and its focus on the legal, regulatory, contractual and operational obstacles that arise between a planned network and an operating one.
The practice assists broadband providers, telecommunications carriers, infrastructure developers, investors, engineering firms and other stakeholders with matters involving:
- Pole attachments and joint-use disputes;
- Public and private rights-of-way;
- Fiber-optic network development;
- Railroad crossings and rail-corridor agreements;
- Utility coordination and infrastructure access;
- Permitting and deployment strategy;
- Construction and infrastructure agreements;
- FCC and state regulatory advocacy;
- Infrastructure-related disputes and formal FCC proceedings; and
- Regulatory and infrastructure due diligence for acquisitions, financing and network expansion.
The Firm’s approach combines traditional telecommunications regulatory experience with the transactional and infrastructure experience required to address problems where law, engineering, construction, real estate and regulation intersect.
That intersection increasingly will determine whether America’s broadband policy goals become functioning networks.
The FCC proceeding involving WOW provides one example of why.
Wired or Wireless, Inc. v. Avista Corp.
FCC Proceeding No. 26-236
Bureau ID No. EB-26-MD-005
Contact The CommLaw Group’s Broadband & Telecom Infrastructure Team
James F. “Jim” Booth — Of Counsel
Fiber Network Development, Rights-of-Way, Construction & Infrastructure Transactions
E-Mail: jfb@commlawgroup.com
Leela Vangala — Telecom, Technology & Commercial Contracts Attorney
Infrastructure Agreements, Railroad & Right-of-Way Matters, Network Deployment
E-Mail: lgv@commlawgroup.com
Robert H. “Rob” Jackson — Of Counsel
FCC Advocacy, Pole Attachments, Regulatory Litigation & Telecommunications Policy
703-714-1316
rhj@commlawgroup.com