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To: esecurities(tm) who wrote (24023)	6/25/1999 1:40:00 PM
From: Philip Williams	Respond to of 41369

Interesting article: June 24, 1999 Fiber-Optic Cable: Where Does It Lie? Telephone companies are in a frenzy of laying fiber-optic cable all across America. Just one problem: Who really owns all that land? By Geoffrey Colvin Peer out the window of a moving train, and you might notice small warning signs posted along the track. Fiber-optic cables, owned perhaps by AT&T, MCI, Sprint, or Qwest, are buried here, the signs announce, and woe betide anyone who rips them up. Trouble is, the railroads often don't own the land they blithely leased to the telecoms for as much as $25,000 per mile. In some cases, all the railroad ever had was an easement to lay track and run trains over Farmer Brown's land. Farmer Brown, it seems, often still owns the land for any other use. For telecom companies, that could be a pricey complication. AT&T has agreed to pay $45,000 per mile to landowners along 70 miles of abandoned Penn Central tracks in Indiana. Just how expensive this will be for the telecom industry is anybody's guess. But as a legal headache, it's about to attain migraine status. A lawyer is filing nationwide class-action suits against a dozen big railroads, pipelines, utilities, and telecom companies. If judges in a few more states approve class-action suits against the utilities and railroads, telecom companies will likely move quickly to settle.