Bottlenecks for BEAD Construction

It’s now clear that State Broadband Offices are going to put a lot of pressure on Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) winners to spend grant awards and build networks as quickly as possible. Internet service providers (ISP) 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:

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.