BEAD’s Buried Fiber Will Add Millions of Utility Locates to a Strained 811 System
BEAD
funding
The ACLP estimates how many 811 locate tickets and utility notifications BEAD-funded buried fiber will generate, and what states can do to keep locates from becoming a bottleneck.
Key Takeaways
- BEAD projects will deploy 271,782 miles of buried fiber, 57.5% of all BEAD fiber miles.
- Before burying that fiber, ISPs will have to make sure they do not disrupt other infrastructure that might already be in the ground. To do this, ISPs will have to navigate the utility locate process, which hinges on owners of that infrastructure – typically electric, water, and gas utilities; municipalities; and other state or local entities – knowing where their lines are buried and accurately marking them.
- Based on ACLP’s analysis of available data, BEAD’s buried fiber will generate about 1.4 million 811 locate tickets.
- Each ticket notifies several utilities, for about 8.1 million facility-locates.
- Service drops to individual homes and businesses, not the fiber route itself, account for 67% of facility-locates.
- Locates are an essential aspect of the broadband deployment process, adding another layer of complexity for BEAD projects and potentially representing an additional bottleneck for ISPs looking to complete their builds in a timely manner. Indeed, inaccurate locates can lead to damage of other lines and service disruptions.
NoteFull Report Available
This post summarizes our BEAD Utility Locates Analysis report, which includes detailed information on our model and assumptions.
The Role of Locates in Burying Fiber
Before burying fiber, an ISP must file a locate request with a state’s “one-call” center. This can be done either by dialing 811 or submitting the request electronically. Each request generates a ticket, which alerts utilities that another entity wishes to excavate the ground in the vicinity of existing utility infrastructure. In response, each utility dispatches a locator to mark with spray paint, flags, or other methods the location of a gas line, water main, sewer line, electrical line, or other infrastructure. Oftentimes, though, many utilities lack a clear and accurate view of where their lines and pipes are buried in the ground, adding time and complexity to the locate process.
Damage or severance of lines is unfortunately common, owing both to the byzantine nature of buried lines and the fact that the exact whereabouts of certain infrastructure is unknown. Other times, damage is purely accidental. Regardless, service disruptions stem from these incidents, leaving customers without power or gas or internet connectivity until the line is repaired. Given the increasingly interconnected nature of our nation’s critical infrastructure, these disruptions can be severe, as happened recently when a backup fiber line serving major airports in the Northeast was accidentally cut, resulting in significant flight delays and cancellations.
In 2025, 45.5 million utility locate requests were filed in the U.S. On average, each request yielded 6 transmissions to distinct utilities, generating a total of 273 million transmissions. Telecom firms and ISPs submit the most damage reports to CGA – at around 30% of all reports – followed closely by excavators and road builders, and natural gas providers. State 811 centers are generally funded by member facility operators, including ISPs, rather than general state appropriations; notification-based fees can place substantial costs on operators with extensive underground networks.
With about 58% of the fiber to be deployed via BEAD needing to be buried, it will be critical for those excavating the ground to install fiber lines to be able to move swiftly and safely through the locates process. This analysis estimates how many locates might be needed during BEAD and offers recommendations for streamlining these processes to ensure they don’t become a bottleneck on the road to deployment.
Estimating BEAD’s Locate Volume
We estimate two measures of the locate workload: tickets, the locate requests ISPs file, and facility-locates, the notifications those tickets send to individual utilities.
Tickets come from two sources. Route tickets cover the buried fiber route, and scale with the 271,782 buried route-miles in 5,806 BEAD projects. Drop tickets cover the buried service connection to each premise, and scale with the roughly 1,418,967 fiber and cable locations served by buried plant.
| Low | Base | High | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Route tickets | 271,782 | 380,495 | 815,346 |
| Drop tickets | 709,484 | 993,277 | 1,418,967 |
| Total tickets | 981,266 | 1,373,772 | 2,234,313 |
| Route facility-locates | 1,630,692 | 2,663,464 | 8,153,460 |
| Drop facility-locates | 2,837,934 | 5,463,023 | 9,223,286 |
| Total facility-locates | 4,468,626 | 8,126,487 | 17,376,746 |
NoteMethodology
Locates are estimated in two components: route locates are buried miles × tickets per mile × route fan-out, and drop locates are buried premises × drop tickets per premise × drop fan-out. Fan-out is the number of utilities each ticket notifies.
| Assumption | Low | Base | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| Route tickets per mile | 1 | 1.4 | 3 |
| Route fan-out | 6 | 7 | 10 |
| Drop tickets per premise | 0.5 | 0.7 | 1 |
| Drop fan-out | 4 | 5.5 | 6.5 |
Route tickets per mile reflect state one-call ticket length caps and ticket renewals. Fan-out is anchored by 6.09 notifications per ticket nationally, 5.79 in North Carolina, and 5.43 in Texas. Route tickets cross more utilities than the typical ticket, so route fan-out is set at or above the national mean; drop fan-out is set at or below it. Buried premises are BEAD fiber and cable locations multiplied by the buried share of BEAD fiber miles.
Buried miles and locations are from BEAD Final Proposal data as of 2026-08-27. Estimates are national only. Full sourcing for every assumption is in the full report.
Why This Matters
With BEAD-funded projects likely to generate more than 1 million locate requests and roughly 8 million transmissions, the concentrated nature of this nationwide buildout could intensify longstanding gaps in locating capacity, facility records, and coordination. This could result in project delays if utilities fail to act in a timely manner on requests or if there is a shortage of qualified locators to make the necessary marks.
Many BEAD projects will occur in rural and historically underserved areas where underground infrastructure records may be incomplete, outdated, or unavailable. As excavation activity increases, contractors may encounter undocumented or abandoned facilities, creating additional deployment costs, construction delays, service disruptions, and potential public safety risks. These challenges reinforce the importance of accurate facility records and timely utility locating before excavation begins.
States and the federal government have been working to improve the utility locate process for the last three decades. Congress required the establishment of what became the 811 toll-free number in 2002 (the FCC formalized this in 2005). Since then, telecom firms, utilities, and others have enhanced collaboration via initiatives like the Common Ground Alliance (CGA) to increase utilization of the one-call process, encourage timely follow through on requests, and reduce damages to buried infrastructure.
Though much improved, this process remains far from perfect. Damage continues to occur. The leading cause remains underuse of the one-call process. According to CGA, almost a quarter – 22% – of so-called “root causes for damage events” in 2025 stemmed from an entity digging up the ground without first requesting locates via the one-call process. The second biggest root cause stemmed from an excavator failing to maintain clearance of the marked infrastructure. However, when combined, errors by locators – either by failing to mark something (14.2% of root causes) or marking something inaccurately (9.2%) – caused the most damage. For the many smaller ISPs and those without a significant track record in the broadband space – entities that, together, comprise a sizeable portion of BEAD awards, including 24 subgrantees holding about $3.0 billion in support that will more than double their existing service territory – their inexperience could result in an uptick in damage events. This is somewhat common when smaller or new ISPs attempt to scale too quickly.
The consequences can be severe. In April 2025, a subcontractor installing fiber in Lexington, Missouri drilled into a capped gas main that the gas utility had failed to mark, even though 811 had been notified five days earlier; the gas ignited more than three hours later, destroying a home and killing a five-year-old boy. That September, the same city halted all fiber work after crews hit unmarked gas lines twice in 24 hours.
A CGA report released in 2023 noted that, while damage events have mostly plateaued in recent years, “the 811 system has struggled to match the excavation demands of a technology-driven world.” At the same time, stakeholders continue to grapple with the sector-wide challenge around recruiting and retaining qualified locators. Taken together, the National Utility Locating Contractors Association has observed that these trends place the locates sector on a path to costly and dangerous failure.
State Responses
In response, several states have attempted to address these issues during the BEAD planning process. Louisiana, for example, has developed a straightforward BEAD Excavation Decision checklist that details the steps that subgrantees need to take before burying their fiber. Many other states appear to have defaulted to the catch-all requirement that subgrantees comply with all relevant state laws when building their networks (all 50 states have one-call/811 laws). In practice, this only addresses one side of the locate equation and does nothing to acknowledge or address the likelihood that utilities or locators might fail to act in a timely manner in response to requests made by ISPs. In addition, no matter how good a state’s plan or checklist is on paper, or how efficiently locate requests are processed, utility owners, particularly cities and towns with older infrastructure, may not know where their facilities actually are. Gaps in a utility’s records should not shift the cost or responsibility for mapping and marking its facilities to broadband providers; each party must still meet its own damage-prevention obligations.
To prevent unnecessary damage events, states must do more to bolster their one-call processes. Indeed, states could seize the forthcoming surge in locate requests that will likely accompany BEAD projects to raise awareness of and address the myriad challenges facing this critical but often overlooked part of infrastructure deployment.
In the near term, states could work with relevant stakeholders – PUCs, utilities, the CGA, etc. – to educate ISPs about the importance of using the 811 process and “calling before digging.” The primary beneficiary of this information will be those ISPs with little or no prior experience in burying fiber. Indeed, the likelihood of entities running afoul of the locates process increases significantly across the very long tail of small and new ISPs that are participating in BEAD. In addition, states could leverage available funds, perhaps including BEAD non-deployment funds, to support a surge in hiring of skilled locators, or to cover the cost of trained third-party locators. States could also use those funds for targeted mapping of underground infrastructure along the path of broadband deployment.
Over the longer term, states could create workforce development pipelines to generate a sufficient supply of qualified locators, and prioritize available facility records and targeted verification along planned broadband routes. Broader mapping improvements should proceed in phases rather than become a prerequisite for BEAD construction, while preserving required locating and safe-excavation practices.
In sum, utility locates represent another unheralded yet essential aspect of the broadband deployment process. Along with utility poles, permitting, private easements, and other ROW access, utility locates add another layer of complexity for BEAD projects and could become an additional bottleneck for ISPs looking to complete their builds in a timely manner. As with so many of these issues, policymakers can and must act to make it easier and more cost-effective for ISPs to build, while protecting the public from damage to existing utilities. Otherwise, project delays and increased costs could slow deployment and delay connecting the nearly 4 million locations that remain without broadband.