As I mentioned recently, our household decided to switch from Starlink to Cox fiber Internet. I was happy with Starlink, but the gamers in the house wanted higher speeds and lower latency.
On the initial installation attempt, the contractor said we were just too far from the main node to connect, so we thought it was over. No biggie. But then another contractor came back and said "no, it's fine." He ran the fiber from the node to our house and told us they'd be back to bury it later.
Yesterday, there was a knock on the door that I missed, so I hopped on my motorcycle to go see if they were working on it down at the main road. They were, kind of ...
The gentleman who lives at the corner was telling them they couldn't bury the fiber because the path was on his property.
They kept trying to explain that they were burying it right at the edge of the road, well within the utilities easement.
He insisted that there WAS no easement, that in fact the road ran through his property but belonged to him, and that he just allowed the 10 or so households down it to use it out of the goodness of his heart, but that they couldn't bury the fiber there.
It's a road with a county name and a county street sign, and I showed one of the guys the county works the survey posts where the path for eventual paving are placed (the road as surveyed does not QUITE follow the path cars have actually been traveling, presumably for at least 20 years, but we had our property surveyed last fall and I found the posts in some trees just outside our survey flag).
Which was great, the guy told me, but even if there WAS no actual pre-described "utility easement," there would be an "easement by implication" (due to the long use of the roadway without objection from the property owner) and/or "easement by necessity" (without that road, all those properties would otherwise be "land-locked").
So they ended up running the fiber. Which, presumably, the other guy will never have any reason to notice, since it's buried right along the edge of, and in, the cow path the county says is a "road." So now the kids have their fast Internet (since I use wifi, and it maxes out below the speeds of either Starlink or fiber, the only change I'm seeing is the name of the network I connect to).
Anyway, I can't really blame the guy for objecting if that roadway WAS actually within the survey lines of the lot he bought years ago. But it did seem like a mountain and molehill situation. It's not like they were using a backhoe to trench up the path to his driveway and keep him from getting in and out for hours. They had a little tracked thing that looks like one of those bomb disposal robots you see on TV shows, and the only evidence it left behind was a thin line in the dirt. Probably blocked his driveway for about 30 seconds.
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