Okay, but it’s not as if installing stuff on poles has meaningful public oversight even when it requires hard-wiring. It might make such deployments ever so slightly more likely by reducing the labor costs a little bit, but is otherwise entirely irrelevant.

If there’s ever public input into that sort of stuff at all, it doesn’t come at the putting-hardware-on-poles phase; it comes at the budgeting or procurement phase. And even then, that’s only if there’s a specific project with a specific budget line-item: at the political level of “we’re proposing to spend $X million on a contract with Y vendor to provide Z service,” no politician knows or cares whether the shit is hard-wired or plugged into a socket, or whether that changes over the course of the contract! It’s nothing but a minor implementation detail.

…Actually, speaking of which, I should correct myself: complaining about it may not damage your credibility after all. But that’s because most politicians’ eyes are just gonna glaze over before they even understand what the fuck you’re talking about well enough to nitpick.