Streamlining fiber network construction: Permitting without the paper chaos.

Welcome back to Bite Size Fiber, the podcast where we unpack the biggest telecom and fiber challenges one bite at a time. I'm your host, Ellie Pulse, and in Episode 2 of our Network Construction Management Series, we're getting into one of the most frustrating but crucial parts of any build, permitting. Today I'm joined by Greg Ross, a veteran of fiber construction with more than three decades of real-world experience. And Stefan Schneider, who spent his career bridging the gap between field operations and digital tools. We're talking about how permitting can quickly spiral into chaos when it's paper-based and disconnected, and how operators are using digital tools to streamline approvals, track statuses, and keep construction moving without the headaches. Let's get into it. What are some of the other challenges of permitting that you guys have run into? The number one thing with permitting is if your project is a large project or a small project, smaller projects don't really have as many permits involved with those. But if you have a customer that's going to go out and do an overall upgrade, let's say, for example, a telco company will go out and do an entire wire center that could be anywhere from 50 miles to 300 miles. We were actually able to draw polygons around the field. We were able to draw polygons around the build area that encompassed the permit in which we submitted to the agency. And we could track that with a unique identifier, and we could look it up, and we could change the status on a particular permit. What we first did was we created a new permit. Then once you submit that permit, you change that status to a yellow color for a status. And then that lets all the construction guys, because they can see that live while they're in the office. So they can get a gauge on when the permit was submitted and then when it was approved. So once a permit gets submitted and then we approve the permit after that, we turn that polygon green and we change the status to approved. And at that time, we upload the approved permit to that particular polygon in network manager. Therefore, on a big area, it lets the construction folks know that they have a continuity of approved permits along a certain feeder run, like an F1 feeder run that could go, you know, 20,000 feet. They have the continuity of all the permits being approved by all of the statuses being green. So therefore, it lets them from a planning aspect see where they can go and have all the approved permits, and they can download the permits out of the permit polygon field. And then they'll have all them in their truck, and then they can do their forecasting for that. And like I said before, it lets them have a copy of the permit in the field so that if an agency pulls up on them while they're actually doing the work, then they have that documentation on hand. That's super cool. Have you guys ever seen anything like this? Or is this kind of one of the first of its kind of this type of capability? This is the first time that we've actually had a software that I've used to where you can keep it up to date. It's real mobile in the field. We didn't really have any issues with connectivity. I mean, as long as you have an LTE or a 5G connection in the field, and obviously, if you're able to have a Wi-Fi, that's ideal. But most of the time when we were in the field, and I personally tested that, I didn't really have a connection issue at all. So with that new capability of doing that, being able to see the approved permits real time, and to have the permit approved to the permit polygon, it streamlines the permitting process. That's because you can't complete construction without the permit. So like I said before, they go hand in hand. You need the most current construction drawing, and you need the approved permit for that particular area. So this was the first time that I had both of them readily available to me on a particular job. Yeah, it is a fairly new technology, and it's a fairly new approach to managing your permit documentation. Before IQ Geo, I haven't seen anyone do this in the field. Everyone that I ever dealt with that dealt with permitting had a massive folio worth of printed permits, amendments done in marker and red pen, a bunch of construction prints with a lot of red lines done on the fly. Maybe they would have a laptop with some pre-permitting or building documentation that they had to search through. But it was very chaotic for the person in the field just to find and manage all that information. Documents flying, whoops, I forgot this, on the truck, and the truck's like two miles down the road. Used to see all kinds of stuff. Yeah, that sounds so chaotic. It's almost hard to imagine now, in the digital age, that paper is still so used.