The FCC wants a 120 day clock on local permits for fibre, and it wants the free conduit a city asks for subtracted from the fee that city may charge
One hundred and twenty days. That is the deadline the Federal Communications Commission proposes to put on a city, a county or a state deciding whether a company may dig up a road to lay fibre, and the consequence of missing it is that the government is presumed to have prohibited the service outright.
The notice of proposed rulemaking was filed on Thursday morning in docket WC 25-253. It proposes that a failure to act on all applications for authorisation to use the public rights-of-way within that period constitutes an effective prohibition under Section 253(a) of the Communications Act, and that the savings clauses at Section 253(b) and (c) do not rescue it. The clock would start when the provider files a written application, or, where a government requires steps before an application, when the provider takes the first mandatory one. Some state and local commenters want it to start only once an application is deemed complete, which is a different thing entirely, and the Commission asks about that too.
The fee proposal has no number in it
The second proposal caps what a government may charge at a reasonable approximation of its actual, direct costs of managing the rights-of-way, with safe harbour levels that would presumptively comply.
Those levels do not exist yet. The Commission asks whether to follow the shape of its 2018 Small Cell Order, which set safe harbours of $500 for non-recurring fees covering an application of up to five small wireless facilities, $100 for each facility beyond five, $1,000 for a new pole, and $270 per facility per year for recurring fees. Whether wireline should get the same structure, a different one, or a single blended level is put to commenters rather than answered.
The part that is actually novel
The third proposal is the one with no precedent in the wireless rules, and the document works it through in numbers.
If a safe harbour permitted a municipality to collect $3,000 for a project, and the municipality also required the provider to install conduit for municipal use at a cost of $1,200, that $1,200 would be deducted. The municipality would then be presumed compliant only if it collected no more than $1,800 in fees, or if it could show its actual direct costs exceeded the total. Run it the other way and the arithmetic holds: a government charging $2,800 could demand no more than $200 of in-kind compensation.
A fourth proposal would stop governments applying tougher conditions to wireline infrastructure because it may also carry other services on a commingled basis, a practice the document links in the record to state rate regulation of broadband.
What the record says, and who said it
The examples come from filings in response to a 2025 notice of inquiry, and they belong to the companies that made them rather than to the Commission.
T-Mobile pointed to a Minnesota city charging $160 for any structure a company installs, and to an Ohio city where a single fibre construction application is reviewed by 13 departments and 70 individuals. USTelecom described a Minnesota city seeking close to $30,000 in per-linear-foot fees for one block. WISPA said permits in Ottawa County, Ohio remain valid for only 90 days once granted, which leaves a provider racing a clock it did not start. The document also cites the Tenth Circuit in City of Santa Fe, where an ordinance charging $6,000 a year in rent for a single 12 foot by 18 foot block of concrete was preempted.
Comments are due 45 days after the notice publishes in the Federal Register, and reply comments 90 days after. The Commission also seeks comment on whether it has the authority to do any of this.
