When the Shovels Hit the Dirt: Deployment Specialists Discuss Challenges & Opportunities

As NTIA clarifies and approves BEAD Volume II plans across the country, the Fiber Broadband Association’s Deployment Specialists Committee is looking ahead to the next steps in the process of transforming federal goals and state grants into fiber networks reaching the unserved and underserved across the nation. In the not-too-distant future, work orders for the first BEAD-funded projects will be issued to start digging trenches and sending linemen up poles.

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.