[jessaustin]

Having worked at a CLEC in the mid-2000s, I can well imagine the pain involved in ATT "making ready" a utility pole. If they have a 60-day window, then in the typical case, on day 58 they'll bounce your work order with some nonsensical reason code. So you hurry to follow up with your service rep that day, but she'll have to "investigate", which will take until the weekend, and then you'll get a "just resubmit it" on next Tuesday. Then if you're lucky the made_ready status in the database will change sometime in the next 60 days. At no point will a tech actually visit the pole in question. They just figure that it's right and proper for a competitor of theirs to have to wait three months to serve a customer.