A question I’m often asked is if a big flurry of BEAD grants will encounter any big bottlenecks that will slow down the implementation of grant construction. My response is yes, but maybe not the bottlenecks most people expect.

Before trying to answer the question, we should put BEAD grants into perspective. These grants will bring north of $50 billion in spending to the industry between 2025 and 2029. While that is huge, we can’t forget that there is currently a huge amount of fiber construction going on from the many other broadband grant programs. We also are seeing a continued burst of fiber construction from large telcos converting copper to fiber and fiber overbuilders staking out new markets. BEAD is not going to create the giant blip you might imagine.

But there will be bottlenecks that affect BEAD, and I expect some of the following:

• Engineering and Design. BEAD means a lot of miles of fiber to design in 2025 into 2026. I’m guessing this could easily result in a 50% increase in demand for the folks who design networks.
• Environmental Studies. Many BEAD studies will require environmental studies. This is something that is not done for most other fiber construction. I predict a bottleneck for environmental scientists, particularly when BEAD project first get started in 2025 and 2026.
• Locators. I expect there will be more aerial than buried fiber built with BEAD, but there will still be a substantial need for buried locators. The shortage is mostly going to come from construction in rural counties that don’t have the resources available to handle a big increase in workload.
• Pole Make-Ready. A lot of people have been yelling warnings about this. The biggest bottlenecks will be from pole-owners that get swamped with huge numbers of requests to get onto poles. Many of these utilities have never seen large numbers of connection requests before. There are regulatory rules that say the process has to be speedy, but that’s not going to matter when the pole owner can’t handle the volume.
• Permitting and Rights-of-ways. Local governments will be asked to issue a huge number of permits for construction. The problem is going to be similar to the bottleneck with locators in that a lot of this construction will be in rural counties that often have little or no staff. ISPs that are already building in rural counties have been saying that this is an unexpected and sometimes major delay.
• Fiber Contractors. I believe all BEAD projects will find a construction contractor. The delays will come from contractors trying to keep technicians. The Powers and Communications Contractors Association (PCCA) recently warned the industry that there is a current shortage of 28,000 experienced construction technicians. That shortage will likely by contractors having a hard time keeping staff who are lured away for higher pay. We’ve always seen this in times of big construction demand.
• Fiber Materials. Vendors have had a long time to get ready for BEAD. But there will still be delays when a huge percentage of these projects want to buy materials within a relatively short time window. I also worry that some of the manufacturers who made a big splash out of opening a U.S. factory will have problems supplying everybody with BABA-compliant hardware.

I do not expect most of these delays to be crippling, and we won’t be returning to the delays we saw during the pandemic when projects shut down for lack of critical staff or materials. The bottlenecks will not affect all projects but will be regional and almost always unexpected. But delays will slow construction at times, and that means extra cost for anybody building a network.