Across the telecom ecosystem, physical infrastructure is under unprecedented demand. Telecom operators are executing multi-year fiber expansions. And the rapid expansion of AI and hyperscale data centers is driving demand for optical bandwidth.
The largest carriers are turning that demand into build plans. AT&T reached 38.6 million fiber locations and expects to pass 40 million by year-end and more than 60 million by the end of 2030.¹ Verizon plans at least 2 million new fiber passings in 2026 and is aiming for 40 to 50 million over the medium term.²
building fiber is hard and getting costlier.
Building fiber isn’t simple, and it’s certainly getting costlier. In the Fiber Broadband Association’s 2025 cost report, 92% of respondents saw higher deployment costs, and labor made up roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of construction spend. Respondents also flagged make-ready and permitting delays as cost wildcards, sometimes forcing route redesigns and schedule extensions.
That is why the work before construction matters. When labor is most of the bill, a stalled schedule can come with a heavy price tag.
the bottleneck before construction.
Some of the costliest delays happen before crews ever arrive. Fiber deployment is usually measured by what happens in the field. But those steps happen near the end of the timeline. Before them, a project must clear a complex web of prerequisites: local permits, rights-of-way and easements, utility pole attachments, environmental reviews, historic preservation clearances and railroad crossing approvals.
A project can be physically straightforward and administratively complicated. Physical work is visible, while the administrative queue behind it goes underappreciated.
why this bottleneck is easy to miss.
Supply chain disruptions are easy to track. A shortage of fiber optic cable makes the news. A shortage of skilled crews shows up in labor costs. A factory delay leaves an obvious paper trail.
Administrative friction works differently. It rarely appears as a single, headline-making failure. Instead, it is distributed across thousands of individually unremarkable local decisions:
- A municipal plan review sits in an inbox waiting for the next board meeting.
- A state historic-preservation office requests additional survey data for a short stretch of right-of-way.
- A state DOT requests a revised traffic-control plan for a single intersection.
No single decision necessarily stops a major build on its own. But across thousands of route miles, these individual dependencies can determine when physical construction can actually begin. A project can be funded, equipment can be staged and contractors can be ready to mobilize, yet construction can still be waiting on an approval several steps upstream.
why the issue matters more now.
Pre-construction approvals aren’t a new challenge. At carrier scale, the issue is volume: millions of locations across counties, municipalities, state DOTs, utilities and railroads that often have their own rules, forms and fees. Not every build carries the same load, since overlashing onto existing aerial plant can be close to a notice-and-go, but new routes can involve wide-ranging approvals.
Operators describe the same pattern. One carrier ran into a Texas community where the pole owner required engineer-stamped applications. That meant redoing more than 100 permits and holding up over 20,000 locations. Another operator reports permit fees ranging from a couple hundred dollars to $30,000 for a single 200-home project, with requirements that change from one jurisdiction to the next. Executives also say the uncertainty spills over: It’s hard to order materials or hire crews when nobody knows when a permit will come through.³
The same dynamic plays out at every scale. A regional ISP can hit an identical stalled permit or delay. What changes at carrier scale is volume. Instead of one stalled permit threatening one build season, thousands of concurrent projects mean thousands of chances for the same small failure to repeat, and each one carries its own crew, materials and schedule waiting behind it.
first-time-right compliance.
When an application comes back incomplete or out of step with local rules, the fix is usually small. But it can still cost the project a full cycle. The package goes back into the queue behind whatever’s ahead of it, and crews and materials sit idle in the meantime.
Agencies control their review clocks. What a carrier controls is what it submits. A complete, accurate package matched to the jurisdiction avoids a resubmission, and every avoided resubmission is time not lost. That depends on people. Requirements vary by county, utility and DOT, and what a team learns in one place only helps in the next if the team is able to retain that knowledge.
conclusion.
For decades, the industry has improved physical deployment speed through directional drilling, fusion splicers and skilled field crews. But networks don’t move from blueprints to live assets through physical labor alone.
A critical layer sits before the first trench is dug: rights-of-way access, utility coordination, local permitting and regulatory clearance. These safeguards exist for valid reasons. The goal isn’t to eliminate oversight, but to recognize a simple reality, which is that infrastructure ambition can grow faster than the administrative capacity needed to support it. Time becomes a limiting factor when this happens.
For telecommunications leaders, this complexity requires treating the pre-construction phase as infrastructure capacity in its own right.
Randstad Digital provides that capacity: OSP engineering and PMO talent who handle route engineering, permitting, right-of-way and compliance work ahead of construction, all while protecting the jurisdiction-specific knowledge that keeps a package from bouncing stays with the people doing the work.
Talk to Randstad Digital about your OSP portfolio today.