Tag Archives: Locates

Will BEAD Encounter Bottlenecks?

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.

Bottlenecks for BEAD Construction

It’s now clear that State Broadband Offices are going to put a lot of pressure on BEAD winners to spend grant awards and build networks as quickly as possible. ISPs generally have the same goal, because getting customers quickly is the best way to make sure an ISP can pay for the network.

However, there are numerous reasons why BEAD fiber construction might be delayed. Companies building in the northern U.S. must contend with a short construction season that makes it hard to build in the winter. While the whole industry has been gearing up to support BEAD projects, there still might be supply chain bottlenecks that pop up to plague some projects when there is a sudden flood of BEAD projects.  Some projects are going to get bogged down in environmental studies – particularly if the firms that do this kind of work are also swamped by the number of BEAD projects.

There are a few other major and predictable bottlenecks that will delay a lot of BEAD projects. For all construction, a possible major bottleneck is permitting. For aerial fiber construction, there will be delays due to make-ready issues on poles. For buried projects, there will be delays due to locating existing utilities.

Permitting. Contractors must obtain permits to engage in any construction. Since BEAD will largely be constructed in rural areas, the expected problems will come from county governments that are not ready to process permits that could cover a huge portion of the geography in a county. Counties might also be simultaneously dealing with projects funded by the FCC’s RDOF program, the FCC’s EACAM program, ReConnect grants, State broadband grants, and ARPA-funded grants. A lot of rural county’s have only a handful of employees and are not prepared for an onslaught of permitting requests.

Make-Ready. Make-ready is an industry term used to describe any work that must be done first to enable adding fiber to a pole. The effort required with make-ready can range from fairly simple work like trimming back tree branches that would interfere with the construction to the complex effort required to replace poles that can’t accommodate an additional fiber.

The process of putting fiber onto poles is highly regulated, and various States either have their own pole regulations or follow the FCC rules. Pole rules generally set a shot clock on how long a pole owner has to respond to a request to get onto poles and then complete any needed make-ready work. But for various reasons this process doesn’t always go smoothly, and there is a litany of things that can slow down the process. Some pole owners cooperate in the process while others quietly resist. Notably, State and federal pole rules don’t apply to poles owned by cooperatives and municipalities. Some poles are owned jointly by an electric utility and a telephone company and require that both parties buy off on requested changes. Pole replacement usually brings in the existing utilities that have wires on a pole – some of which will be competing with the new ISP. I could make a pages long list of specific ways that getting the make-ready work done could cause delays.

Locating. It’s mandatory that somebody locates existing buried utilities and other underground obstructions before somebody tries to bury new fiber. This is both a safety precaution (because hitting a gas or electric line can be deadly) and an attempt to minimize damage to existing underground utilities. It’s likely that you’ve seen evidence of a locate when you see spray painted lines and perhaps a message on streets like shown at the top of this blog.

Locates are not handled the same way everywhere. In some places, each existing utility locates its own infrastructure. In other jurisdiction the local government locates. In some places the locate work has been handed off to a third-party locator that ocates for every utility. The delays from locates are going to materialize when the folks who do the locates are going to be swamped by the sheer volume of miles of roads that must be examined due to BEAD.

Solutions. The NTIA recognized these roadblocks early and encouraged states to develop rules to expedite these processes, at least for the BEAD grant process. Some states have done so to some degree and have done things like tackling updated pole attachment rules. But it’s fairly obvious that most states have done nothing. In many cases the only solution is more money. For example, counties might need to hire additional locators or permitting staff to be ready for the increased workload.

It’s still not too late for states and counties to tackle these issues. I predict that the heaviest BEAD construction is going to be in 2026, meaning these pre-construction issues will hit in 2025. A lot of states have said that getting broadband to rural areas is a high priority – but if they don’t look at these key issues, then state and local governments will be part of the problem instead of the solution.