I know a number of counties and cities that have adopted dig once policies that require that every major road project includes burying empty conduit along new or reworked roads. A lot of them have found out that just having the policy is not enough, and that dig once is more complicated than they imagined.

It’s a common misconception that dig once just means laying conduit in the ground while roads are dug up for repaving. It’s not that easy. It turns out that most contractors who are fulfilling road construction projects are not sympathetic to any activities that delay the roadwork, so they are not particularly accommodating to a fiber construction crew. The road contractor often gets no extra compensation for working with the party laying the conduit, so they often make it hard for the conduit installers to get the work done by giving them a very short window to get the work done or requiring work to be done at night.

One way to make dig once work better would be to require road contractors to build fiber construction into their schedules. That sounds easy enough, but many road projects are funded by sources other than the local government, so getting dig once provisions into a state road project can be a major challenge.

A bigger question is who pays for the conduit. While burying conduit when the roadway is open is far less costly than normal fiber construction, it’s not free. Should the local government require the road contractor to pay for the conduit installation and build it into the road contract? I find it troubling to think about requiring a road contractor to build fiber since it’s not in their skill set.

The other primary issue with a dig once policy is placing access points – places where an ISP or carrier can get access to the conduit and fiber. Without the right access points, buried conduit can be nearly worthless. One problem is that it’s impossible to know upfront who might use the conduit in the future. Somebody who is looking for pure transport through the area won’t care about access points. But an ISP that wants to build last mile fiber will want an access point for every few potential customers – and that can be expensive, even with dig once. It’s even more complicated when trying to predict what might be along that stretch of road over the next fifty years. Since the only good time to place the access points is when the conduit is placed, somebody has to make this determination before the conduit is placed.

For a dig once policy needs to be effective, there also has to be a way to let the world know where conduit is available. This means having a website with a map of available conduit, a list of the policies that anybody that wants to use the fiber must follow, and a price determined for anybody that want to use the conduit.

Dig once sounds like a great idea, but unless conduit is placed in ways that are useful to ISPs, it will never be used. I know ISPs who have considered using government conduit and decided not to. To use a buried conduit means meeting a dig once route at both ends, and that is often not convenient or easy.

Finally, a local government that mandate dig once has to be patient. ISPs will not be rushing to incorporate random short conduit runs into their network design. Dig once only gets attractive when there are enough routes built to be of interest.