I recently read an article from the ABC TV station in Cleveland that covers local complaints about damage caused during fiber construction. It’s titled. “It’s Terrible!: Local Communities Angered about Damages Caused by Broadband Installations”. This is not a headline that any ISP building a network wants to see.

In this particular case, the construction was being done in Brunswick Hills Township by Frontier, who used MasTec as the construction vendor. The story includes a complaint from a resident who said MasTec had hit a buried electric line and that she was reduced to using candles for months. The construction also hit a gas line and recently hit another buried electric line that knocked out power for 200 for ten hours.

Anybody who has ever buried fiber is familiar with these kinds of incidents. Sometimes the problems are caused by operator error where the company doing the construction makes a mistake. However, the problem often comes from the locating vendors that misidentify existing buried utilities. Folks who bury fiber would love to never hit any utility, but it unfortunately happens with fair regularity.

More troublesome in this story is a claim that the construction contractor left a large open hole behind them. It’s worth watching the video, because there is a huge hole that looks like it was intended for a fiber vault. The hole looks to be well off what normally be considered as public right-of-way where construction is allowed to dig without an easement from a property owner.

The real issue of the story is that Frontier and its contractor left behind some big messes. This story must be concerning to the many construction contractors that get this right. Contractors generally have a person assigned to construction projects to deal with the problems that inevitably arise. This particular incident would never have been a story if the situation had been dealt with immediately to the satisfaction of homeowners.

Let’s face it. Fiber construction is messy. Boring means digging holes, which quickly become messy in wet weather. Construction in the right-of-way upsets homeowners who think of the public areas next to the street as part of their front yard.

A lot of my ISP clients like to get ahead of these issues. They put doorhangers on every home in a construction area a week or so before construction to tell them what to expect. Most ISPs insist that contractors return areas to as near to original condition as possible after the construction. Most contractors today take pictures of areas before and after they dig as proof that they did the restoration work after digging.

ISPs also often talk to town officials ahead of time to tell them what to expect, and to give them somebody to contact when they hear about problems. Nobody wants a town official on TV complaining about them like happened in this story.

An ISP that makes a mess also has to worry about resident who refuse to buy service from them. A lot of my clients look at the construction process as a sales opportunity, and they knock on doors during the process to apologize for the commotion and mess and to introduce their new fiber broadband.