The Fiber Is Coming. Do You Know What’s Already Underground?

The Fiber Is Coming. Do You Know What’s Already Underground?

Federal broadband construction could generate 8.1 million underground utility locates. For local governments, the challenge is knowing what’s buried before excavation begins.

Before celebrating the fiber coming to their communities, city and county leaders should ask a less photogenic question: Do we actually know what’s already underground?

This is not an argument against broadband investment. It is an argument for preparing the ground, operationally and literally, before construction schedules outrun the people, records and systems needed to support them.

A digital line on a screen should never be mistaken for a verified underground position.

Millions of Locates Are Coming

The scale deserves attention.

A study released October 8 by the Advanced Communications Law & Policy Institute (ACLP) at New York Law School projects that projects funded through the federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program will deploy 271,782 miles of buried fiber. That is 57.5% of all BEAD fiber miles.

Researchers Alex Karras and Michael Santorelli estimate that this construction will generate about 1.4 million 811 tickets and 8.1 million utility facility locates in their base case. Their range runs from about 4.5 million to 17.4 million locates, depending on construction conditions.

A single 811 ticket notifies several utility owners. And two-thirds of the projected facility locates (67%) come from service drops that connect individual homes and businesses, not from the main fiber routes.

These are projections, not proof that local locating operations will be overwhelmed. But they are a substantial planning signal.

A broadband construction schedule is also a demand forecast for everyone responsible for what is already underground.

Your City Is a Locator, Too

When excavators call 811, cities and counties are on the receiving end. As utility owners, they must mark their own water mains, sewer lines, stormwater pipes and traffic-signal conduit within the response windows set by state law.

That makes a locate surge a staffing and budget question. Who answers the tickets? Are in-house crews or contract locators sized for a multi-year spike? What happens to routine maintenance when locators are pulled onto broadband work?

The ACLP report points to one answer: it suggests states consider using BEAD non-deployment funds to hire or contract locators and to map underground infrastructure along planned routes. Local governments should be part of that conversation with their state broadband office.

Officials should also ask where, when and how much of the demand will reach their utilities. Planning only for the main construction corridors will miss the thousands of small excavations needed to connect individual properties.

Underground Damage Is Already Rising

The industry’s damage record offers little room for complacency.

The Common Ground Alliance (CGA) analyzed 221,717 unique damage reports submitted in 2025 through its Damage Information Reporting Tool, covering the United States and Canada. Its damage index fell to 94 in 2023, then rose to 96.7 in 2024 and 102 in 2025. That is an 8-point increase in two years and the highest level since the index was created against a 2022 baseline of 100.

Telecommunications and cable facilities accounted for 51% of reported damage, and natural gas facilities another 36%.

The more uncomfortable numbers concern who was digging. When telecom and cable lines were damaged, telecom work itself caused 30% of the damage, and water and sewer work came next at 22%. When natural gas lines were damaged, water and sewer work was the leading cause, at 27%.

Work on water and sewer systems, the core of municipal utility operations, is not a bystander to this problem. It is one of its largest sources.

Failure to notify 811 before excavation remained the leading reported cause. Better maps will not fix that. But when contractors follow the rules, the quality of the information available to utility owners and locators becomes decisive.

The Hidden Risk in Every Service Drop

Fiber service drops are often installed by horizontal directional drilling, which bores under yards and driveways without open trenches. It is fast and minimally disruptive. It is also blind.

When a bore passes through a sewer lateral, the result is a cross-bore: a fiber conduit or gas line running straight through a sewer pipe. Nothing may happen for months. Then a homeowner calls a plumber about a backed-up drain, and a cutting tool meets whatever is inside the pipe.

Sewer laterals are often privately owned, poorly documented and not marked through the 811 process. They are exactly the kind of infrastructure that sits outside the map and inside the construction path.

Communities with heavy service-drop activity should ask whether pre-construction lateral inspection, post-construction camera inspection or both should be required.

A Line on a Map Is Not a Known Utility

Most local governments hold underground records across GIS layers, engineering drawings, historical plans and paper files. Some assets were surveyed precisely. Others were digitized from decades-old drawings or estimated from manholes and valves. Depth is often missing, and abandoned lines, private services and undocumented changes may not appear at all.

A digital line on a screen should never be mistaken for a verified underground position.

The ASCE 38-22 standard gives local governments a vocabulary for this. It grades utility information by quality level:

QL-D: existing records and verbal recollection

QL-C: records correlated with surveyed surface features

QL-B: horizontal position designated with geophysical methods

QL-A: precise horizontal and vertical position from direct exposure

The goal is not simply to put more assets on a map. It is to know which mapped assets are reliable, which are approximate and which need investigation. That means improving positional accuracy, completeness, documented confidence and the ability to share reliable information across the systems that plan, build and maintain the right-of-way.

Start With the Construction Footprint

Before major construction begins, city and county leaders should bring broadband deployment plans into the same room as public works, municipal GIS, utility records and locate staffing.

State broadband award data shows where activity is coming. Project-level coordination with providers can then establish routes, construction methods, schedules and service-drop volumes.

Overlaying that footprint on existing water, sewer, stormwater and transportation infrastructure creates the starting point for a practical assessment:

Which assets in the path have reliable location data?

Where are records incomplete or uncertain?

Which corridors have a history of utility damage or crowded underground conditions?

Where uncertainty is high, field verification or subsurface utility engineering may be justified before excavation. The point is not to survey every buried asset. It is to target the places where uncertainty carries the greatest construction and service-disruption risk.

Use the Permit to Improve the Map

Broadband construction will expose utilities, confirm locations and reveal errors in existing records. Without a process to capture those findings, a discovery helps only the crew standing in the hole. The next contractor meets the same uncertainty.

Local governments hold a lever here: the right-of-way permit.

Permit conditions can require georeferenced as-built records for new facilities. They can specify the accuracy and attributes those records must carry, consistent with the ASCE 75-22 standard for recording and exchanging utility data. And they can require crews to report discrepancies, such as an unmarked line, a pipe at the wrong depth or an asset in the wrong place, in a form the city’s GIS team can review and incorporate.

New information should carry its source, collection method and confidence level. Not every field observation is survey-grade, but every verified discovery is a chance to improve the permanent record. Sensitive infrastructure data should be shared under appropriate controls.

Done properly, the broadband buildout could leave communities with more than new telecommunications infrastructure. It could leave them with a better picture of what’s already beneath their streets.

Measure Performance, Not Just Progress

Miles built and premises connected will be the headline measures of broadband success. Local governments should also track how the construction itself performs:

Are locate requests completed within required timeframes?

How often are crews encountering undocumented utilities?

How many infrastructure records require correction?

Are utility damages rising in active construction areas?

These questions belong in the planning conversation, not just the post-mortem.

Measurement makes a difference. CGA reported that excavators in its voluntary Damage Prevention Institute cut their rate of attributable damages per 10,000 work hours by more than 11% between 2023 and 2025, while damages rose nationally. Participants commit to best practices, monthly damage reporting and peer review. The result does not show which practice drove the improvement, but it shows the value of managing damage as a performance metric rather than accepting it as a cost of construction.

For broadband builders, reliable locating and accurate records are not obstacles to deployment. They are what make a construction schedule credible.

The Real Infrastructure Test

The broadband buildout will connect millions of Americans to faster networks. Beneath those new connections lies an older infrastructure system that communities cannot afford to disrupt.

For local governments, this is more than a coordination challenge. It is a chance to confront a question that has been neglected for too long: How much do we really know about the infrastructure beneath our streets?

Every new fiber route will cross a landscape of existing assets. Some are accurately mapped, some imperfectly documented and some unknown. Communities that prepare now can do more than prevent damage. They can use the broadband investment to make their underground records more accurate, more complete and more valuable for decades.

The fiber is coming. The question is whether local governments will know what’s in its path.

Sources

Broadband deployment: Broadband Breakfast, “BEAD Deployments to Flood 811 System…: ACLP Study” (Oct. 8, 2026)

Broadband deployment: Telecompetitor, “BEAD buried fiber could add 8.1M utility locates: Report” (Oct. 8, 2026)

Underground damage: Common Ground Alliance, 2025 DIRT Data Summary & Trends, via Trenchless Technology

Underground damage: Underground Infrastructure, “Buried utility damages hit record high in 2025, CGA reports”

Underground damage: Cabling Installation & Maintenance, “Underground Utility Damage Worsened in 2025”

Utility information quality: ASCE 38-22, Standard Guideline for Investigating and Documenting Existing Utilities

Utility data management: ASCE 75-22, Standard Guideline for Recording and Exchanging Utility Infrastructure Data