Lingering Utility Pole Issues Could Raise Costs and Delay BEAD Buildout

The Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program will fund construction of broadband infrastructure to nearly 4 million unserved and underserved locations across the United States. A significant portion of this build-out will use aerial fiber, which requires attachment to utility poles. Planned aerial deployment totals about 188,287 route-miles, or 41.8 percent of total BEAD fiber miles. Utility poles are plentiful. By some estimates, there are some 180 million poles across the country. Leveraging poles to deploy fiber is cost-effective and can speed network construction. However, negotiating access to poles can be fraught as internet service providers must navigate a patchwork of regulated and unregulated electric utilities of varying sizes and sophistication. These interactions can quickly become adversarial, delaying projects and raising costs. This analysis overlays 3,855,167 BEAD-funded locations across 6,265 projects against 2,053 electric utility service territory boundaries to investigate how BEAD deployments will span utility service territories. We focus on electric utility-owned poles, which comprise the vast majority of poles across the country—upwards of 70 percent according to recent estimates—and because many pole-related disputes between parties involve electric utilities.