For railroad operators, safety is the top of mind when evaluating right-of-way access for anything near or crossing the tracks. Right-of-way access applications require detailed engineering and legal review with each application unique to a location and there are a lot of applications flowing into railroad companies for evaluation.

“We deal with over 3,000 permanent [new] applications a year across 26 states,” said Alex Saar, CSX, Director of Corridor Services – Business Development & Real Estate, CSX Transportation, Inc. “That’s across 20,000 miles of track we have. It’s a high volume with a good cycle time. It’s something we’re proud of every year. We work very hard to provide that level of service.”

CSX is one of six Class I railroad operators in the United States. Defined as railroads with revenue of at least $900 million, Class I railroads account for around 67% of freight mileage and 94% of revenues, according to the Association of American Railroads’ July 2024 fact sheet. In addition to the six Class 1 railroad operators, there is Amtrak and 615 short line Class II and III railroads. There are nearly 140,000 miles of freight rail spanning the continent with railroads large and small operating in 49 states and the District of Columbia.

“Looking at our data, our average application cycle time is 30 [calendar] days or less for a typical utility crossing,” said Saar. “Obviously, for more complex projects and longitudinal occupancies, other criteria can impact reviews, such crossing over a rail, difficult topography, all those different factors. We also offer an expedited option for an additional fee for those crossing permits that do qualify.” 

The company wants to make it easy for applicants to apply for permits on the belief that the less time spent on having to correct and review applications means less resources tied up to deal with a growing volume of applications. To ensure successful first-time right-of-way applications and reduce processing time, CSX has invested “millions of dollars” into its website and back-end technologies, including readily accessible information with engineering specifications, templates and sample drawings, answers to the most frequently asked questions, and an AI chatbot introduced at the beginning of the year to address pertinent questions. 

And the volume of applications has gone up substantially, with a 30% year-over-year increase from 2018 through 2023. “This year, we’re 15% on top of that right now, and permits are continuing to come in,” stated Saar in late May.

Success in railroad permitting applications can depend on the experience with the process by the requesting organization and their third-party assistance. “I will say we do see companies who repeatedly permit correctly and those who do not,” said Saar. “It all depends on the applicants to read and follow all of our instructions posted on the website. Applicant’s engineer’s should ensure the applications comply with our specifications and submit all the correct fees and insurances. There are absolutely fiber companies who often use the same consultant who knows the permitting process. They submit exactly what is needed on the front end and it goes seamlessly through the process. Master agreements, that’s another good way to streamline the process.”

CSX is not standing still on its website. The company has partnered with state rail associations, participating in state permitting conferences, and held numerous meetings with utilities to get feedback on the permitting process and ways to improve it and the web portal. 

“One of the reasons we go to these conferences is to reach out to [applicants],” said Saar. “As you’re designing this, don’t wait until the last minute. The earlier you can partner with us, do it. Don’t wait until the last minute.”

This article and similar stories can be read in the Q3 edition of Fiber Forward Magazine.

Panelists explore deployment challenges and opportunities at Fiber Connect 2024. (Source: FBA)

The “Deployment Challenges and Opportunities: Streamlining Last Mile Connectivity” panel at Fiber Connect 2024 examined the many issues facing what moderator Brendan O’Boyle, chair of the FBA’s Deployment Specialist committee and PLP’s Communications Market National Sales, described as “an unprecedented era of deployment” being driven by BEAD funding and private sector investment. 

Threading through local and state regulation to deploy in a timely manner came up among the primary challenges builders face, especially when the state has one established policy while individual municipalities layer their own preferences on top of it to complicate build processes in each area. 

“For us, it’s really a matter of focusing on ease of deployment, because it’s expensive, it’s hard. It takes a long time,” said Rod Hanson, CEO, Cityside Fiber. “Jurisdictions have their own agenda sometimes…In California, they passed a law requiring microtrenching, requiring cities to have a microtrenching policy and they didn’t dictate what the [exact] policy was. But they did say that you have to have it available, which has helped us tremendously…Most of the cities are fine with microtrenching, but we’ve had cities say you have to restore the entire travel way for a two-inch cut, which doesn’t make any sense.”

“To piggyback on what’s already been said, you can be operating in multiple states, [and also encounter] the lack of consistency at municipalities within the state,” said Jeff Manning, Vice President, Network Strategy, Shentel/Glo Fiber. “Each one has different rules, regulations, how you permit, the process around. It just makes it a complicated process when you’re getting your new construction engine up and running. Every market has different processes to some extent.”

Making sure contractors are suitably qualified and understand the regulations within the markets they operate is also a concern, especially in keeping projects on time and being able to flow field crews to where they are needed. 

“We’re at very early stages,” said Hanson. “Part of that is finding the right vendor by talking to our contractors that have experience in the market. It’s also important that they have experience with the cities that we’re involved with. It goes much easier with cities they are familiar with, with contractors who they are working with, and then they have confidence in the quality of work that they do.”

“One of the keys to be able to hit [deployment] numbers and get the engine really going is the consistency of work for the contractor, so you don’t have to reengage and you don’t have to stall and stop, you can keep him moving to the next level,” said Manning. “Building that model and being able to keep them moving is a great way to perform consistency, maintain the same quality.” 

Training consistency and retaining skilled workers has been a problem for some service providers, with GoNetspeed’s Senior Vice President of Marketing and General Manager of New York Paul Griswold noting that it becomes a question if the contractors “are training their people to train correctly.”  Griswold added they train their own staff for installations as well, but often end up losing them to the power company. “We lose a lot of people that we’ve trained.” GoNetspeed is paying people more and recruiting more people to allow for the inevitable departures. “Still, we lose people all the time,” Griswold stated. 

Plodding Through Permits and Locates

Before work can start, permits need to be secured for digging and securing equipment, but municipalities may not be equipped for the sudden increase in applications as builders lay out their construction plans. “A challenge is getting an expectation of [work] and having those early meetings with the city staff, [getting] the understanding of what it is we’re going to be doing and why it’s important. If you get support from a city manager and the elected officials, they find a way to get permits out to you, it just takes time,” said Hanson.

Communications with city officials is an important point at the early stages of a project, given the critical nature of permitting. “You let them know what the expectations are, here’s what is coming,” said Manning. “If you look at some of these smaller permitting departments, they don’t even know what the volume [of permit applications] is going to look like. When you get in front of it, and start talking through it, they can start thinking about resource challenges that they have, we can start talking about how we can flow permits and help with those resource challenges when you start to build that partnership.” 

Likewise, the ability to efficiently market buried utilities at the large scale and pace of network construction becomes a challenge for towns that rarely have seen a major surge of construction in their lifetime. Working to build cordial relationships in the beginning can make things flow efficiently for construction and ease issues when something inevitably goes wrong. 

“On locates, we’ve done something very similar, because that’s such an issue,” stated Manning, with smaller towns having trouble keeping up with the sudden workload. “We work with them, looking to get support, other locators to come in. We can get into some shared resources that can help move things along. It’s so important to develop those partnerships early and upfront and keep them going through the whole process because there’s going to be damages, we’re going to hit a water line somewhere, right? Being able to restore them quickly, it helps a lot, when we have that partnership in place so that water line hit doesn’t mean the front page and scare off the rest of the community.”

The First Face-to-Face Customer Experience

The first impression a service provider delivers is very important from the day construction starts, even as the first crews start rolling out to climb up poles and dig trenches to deploy conduit. 

“Your first introduction to a new municipality, to a potential customer, is a messy process of plowing through their property and restoring any damages,” said Manning. “The brand opportunity in doing that well is so critical to being able to later onboard those customers. I think you have to put a lot of focus on quality, on restorations. We take damage prevention and damage restoration very seriously. We’ve set up teams and that’s their only focus. You need to respond to a negative impact in 24 hours. It’s amazing the positive impact that has, because they hadn’t necessarily experienced that before. If you can show how you are a different service provider, I think they appreciate that and you have a higher likelihood of onboarding a customer.”

Once initial construction is complete, field technicians dispatched to connect homes play their role in establishing service provider credibility. The fiber tech turning up service may be the first person from the company to physically meet with the customer. First impressions are important.

“I live in Ft. Worth, Texas,” said O’Boyle. “I just got [fiber], but the young man sent to [my] door, had no idea when they deployed and what the conditions were around it…it’s got to be so important to strategize with your contractors and employers about what that legacy has been, what you’ve gone through, what steps you’ve gone through [to deploy fiber].”

“The product certainly matters, your marketing matters,” said Katie Espeseth, Vice President New Products, EPB. “But that person inside your home, standing in front of your customer has got to know the message and carry the message and act consistently with your brand.”

Market Competition

Service providers today are finding that they aren’t alone in building new fiber networks and some markets which once appeared to be sure winners have become less so for a variety of reasons. 

“If you’re the first or second one in, hopefully the first, you’re in a better position,” said Griswold. “As we look around markets starting to figure out where else to go, if there’s two or three [providers], we aren’t going into that market. Two years ago, when we first started this operation, that wouldn’t even apply that we would have multiple fiber competitors in the market, that many and new ones we’ve never seen before, then you have the incumbent.”

GoNetspeed didn’t know it was going to encounter the level of new competition that it is seeing today and is now in the process of backing out of certain markets and looking for other opportunities it hadn’t considered before. Shentel’s fiber build criteria is similar to GoNetspeed’s. 

“We don’t want to be the second fiber provider in the market or the third fiber provider in the market,” stated Manning. “We’re looking for those markets where we can be the first provider, have a technical advantage over what the incumbents have there. And I’ll tie this back to what we said about quality and branding, the image you’re putting out there and how important that image is in competitive market.” 

Being viable in competitive markets requires an investment of time, initially with city officials and then more broadly with the people who live there. “Because we’re aerial [deployment] so much, we don’t need to meet with those towns and villages [for permits], but we do, so they know we’re coming in,” said Griswold. “If we do need permits, we can get permits faster because they understand what we’re trying to do…We really do enjoy getting to know the communities and supporting their community events and things like that. We have to, because then they sign up.”

EBP, now operating broadband fiber in Chattanooga for over a decade, invested considerable time rallying the community in support of the electric co-op’s efforts to install fiber to every household and business in the area, a model which has worked well for it over its many years of operation as a service provider. 

“First, we had to make sure that we had the support of our local officials,” said Espeseth. “Then we spent a lot of time with the business leaders. We met with a group of business leaders every week for an hour and talked to them, this is what we’re going to do. This is what we’re going to spend, this is what we think it will do for our community. Are you for us, are you against us?

“Then we took that message out to any organization that would talk to us. We spun up a speaker’s bureau internally and trained our employees, let them put in their own words, and then we sent them to any civic group that would listen to us and said, ‘This is what we’re going to do. If you want us to do it, but more importantly, if you don’t want us to do it right here. We don’t want to do this if nobody’s going to be behind it.’ I think building those partnerships early on and before we ever put the first fiber in the air or underground was what led to our success.”

This article and similar stories can be found in the Q3 edition of the Fiber Forward Magazine.

As a part of its Smart City approach, the City of Calgary views fiber as a key technology to enable businesses, entrepreneurs, and communities to create solutions along with delivering services and solving community problems. The city currently operates around 800 kilometers of fiber at 1,000 locations, with demark points ranging from office buildings accommodating hundreds of employees to control cabinets necessitating machine-to-machine direct connections and backhauls to specialized control centers.

The primary function of the city’s fiber network revolves around supporting various specialized city-owned networks and emergency services. It also plays a pivotal role in bolstering the Smart City program and facilitating the city’s LoRaWAN® network, crucial for IoT applications. “Smart Calgary Strategy,” a white paper released in February 2023, says the city has been investing in digital infrastructure to delivery Smart City initiatives since 2003, with the Information Technology Department leading its Smart Cities initiative since 2017. 

Calgary leverages other city construction projects to deploy its own fiber. (Source: City of Calgary)

“The City of Calgary’s demand for network connectivity continues to grow significantly,” said Ryan Angelo, Information Technology Leader – Fiber Optics, City of Calgary. “There has been a notable surge in the deployment of fiber to city infrastructure, including high-bandwidth connections to critical systems like traffic control, water and waste networks, security and safety locations, as well as wireless towers.”

Deploying fiber in Calgary has had its challenges, particularly with escalating construction and deployment costs, given the vast size of the city. City planners have implemented a strategy of integrating fiber deployment in large-scale city construction projects to keep costs in check. For example, building an airport tunnel included incorporating direct connections to a mobility operating center and Calgary fire and water services.  

But, like most cities, there’s always extra cable capacity available once the enterprise WAN is enabled and all the government buildings, traffic lights, cameras, and IoT devices are up and running. “Recognizing the importance of fostering innovation, economic growth, and competition within the community, the city licenses its excess dark fiber to businesses and organizations,” said Angelo.

According to the city’s website, “The City of Calgary’s dark fiber network stands as a testament to its commitment to technological advancement, operational resiliency, community empowerment, and fostering collaborative partnerships for a more connected future.” The city’s dark fiber enables new options for organizations to expand their high-speed networks within Calgary, but to be clear, the city is not providing internet access or any other sort of public access to its mission critical or regulated assets. It is, however, more than happy to lease available dark fiber not actively used to connect city buildings, facilities, or other assets. 

Calgary’s dark fiber is also helping research groups in town develop new technologies and innovative services and wider connectivity with the rest of the world, including collaboration with the Calgary Internet Exchange (YYCIX) while partnerships with entities like Cybera and the University of Calgary further amplify the network’s impact. Cybera, a not-for-profit agency helping Alberta advance IT, operates CyberaNet, Alberta’s publicly funded high-speed network connecting the province’s educational institutions, researchers, and IT entrepreneurs, and provincial, national, and international research networks. The University of Calgary uses the city’s dark fiber and space in some facilities to conduct quantum encryption research and enable its research with fiber-as-a-sensor technology. 

“I would like to say the challenges are all due to Hurricane Maria, but it isn’t,” said Maximiliano Trujillo, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Rural Development State Director, Puerto Rico. “There are historical challenges that Puerto Rico has had. Maria has exacerbated that need or highlighted more the need for broadband communications.”

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is in the process of promoting the deployment of advanced, hardened voice and broadband networks in Puerto Rico through the Bringing Puerto Rico Together Fund. With $127 million allocated in Stage 2 deployments to deliver fixed voice and broadband service across 1.22 million locations across the island, 40% of the locations are expected to be turned up by the end of 2024 and an additional 20% more expected to be added each year thereafter until 100% of the locations are covered. Around 69% of locations are expected to have access to download speeds of at least 100 Mbps or faster with 31% percent having download speeds of at least 1 Gbps. 

The FCC’s efforts are only the tip of the iceberg, with the USDA bringing in separate funding for creating opportunities and improving economic conditions outside of urban areas. “Rural Development has different areas of focus, providing mortgages for rural residents for housing and assistance to repair homes,” said Trujillo. “On infrastructure, [Rural Utilities Services] helps municipalities and communities to help build their community facilities and equipment. One series of grants that [USDA] have is distance learning and telemedicine programs that have a broadband component. We are living in a historic moment where the Biden-Harris administration has focused on Puerto Rico’s infrastructure needs and Rural Development is part of this effort to strengthen the economic development of the rural areas of the archipelago.”

Maximiliano J. Trujillo, State Director for Puerto Rico, USDA Rural Development, keynoted at Fiber Connect LATAM Puerto Rico about broadband’s impact on economic development. Source: FBA.

The goal of the Rural Utilities Services (RUS) loans, grants, and loan guarantee programs is to build the infrastructure or provide infrastructure improvements in rural communities to help expand economic opportunities and improve quality of life for rural residents, and to do so in a sustainable manner that puts investment into the area and continues growth in the community. 

USDA is funding fiber in Puerto Rico through the ReConnect program in areas where it is expected to make a significant impact in socially vulnerable communities. Service provider VPNet won an $8.8 million grant in 2022 to deploy fiber to seven public schools in the Arroyo and Patillas municipios that is also expected to reach roughly 200 households.

For Puerto Rico, USDA rural development efforts means funding electrical infrastructure projects to enable and support broadband deployment as well as keeping the other daily necessities of life going, including potable water, doctor’s offices, pharmacies, and the local supermarkets. 

“If you look at a [satellite photo] of Puerto Rico at night just before Maria hit, it looked like a flashlight in the Caribbean,” said Trujillo. “The night that Maria struck, it all went dark and it took years in some communities to get their power back. Without energy, you cannot have anything else. Because of Hurricane Maria, the system was proven to be completely unreliable. 

“There’s a strong drive to move into renewable energy. In the last fiscal year, we impacted 51 projects with grants over $8 million. With the private sector investment [match] of $18 million, we have solar panel investment with batteries of over $26 million in rural areas, that’s an investment not usually seen here, that’s a huge deal. With that, they can have operational internet and their Wi-Fi.”

UTOPIA is no novice in building networks, with 23 completed city-wide projects, three more under construction, and some fiber operations in 70 cities across the country through operation of middle-mile and long-haul networks. And it’s the train tracks that are the biggest headache. 

“Railways can be an enormous obstacle,” said Roger Timmerman, CEO, UTOPIA Fiber. “You try to design your network to avoid as many obstacles [as possible], you want the path of least resistance. When we’ve got a railroad permit that’s required, there are multiple stages involved. Your first pass, everything has to be engineered to a different standard than any other [build process] and each individual railroad [company] is different. You can’t standardize it. The design specs are a little challenging to deal with and because of that you’re more likely to get rejected and have to go back and forth. You might end up with weeks of time between each pass, back and forth through to get through this process.  

“When you get through that and paid your permit fees, there’s another set of work for the build process, it’s another project of just getting it on the schedule to be able to perform the work. You have to schedule when you can build, you must have an approved vendor for flagging and schedule with the flagging company, so that’s another month or longer.”

Source: Microsoft Designer AI

The Association of American Railroads (AAR) asserts that the broadband and utility crossing permit process may take anywhere from four to eight weeks, but Timmerman says that assumes a clean design with a basic crossing request and getting everything right on the first pass. Multiple passes translate to multiple cycles at four to eight weeks per cycle trying to get things correct. 

“When we’re doing a build, if there’s a railroad to cross, we’re planning on six months to a year to get where we need to go,” stated Timmerman. “All these processes of back and forth are a nightmare to deal with.”

Compounding matters are a variable and somewhat arbitrary fee schedule for permitting and having to conduct the same process on all railway designed land, even those that haven’t seen a train in decades or don’t have tracks on them. “Cost wise we’re facing one [build] in Montana where they want to charge us $130,000 for a permit,” said Timmerman. “It’s a footage-based [fee] structure that makes things difficult. At this point, the money is an actual obstacle. We’re trying to redesign it somewhere else just to go into a more reasonable fee structure.” 

Could federal regulation fix the programs with the current situation? Timmerman is doubtful. “You’re hearing more people talk about this than you ever have before,” he said. “The frustration of the general public with how the need for broadband is not being met, gives the opportunity for legislators to step up. But you have the Association of American Railroads taking a defensive position that, ‘We’re not the problem, we’re great, we’re wonderful.’”