More than 270,000 miles of buried fiber are expected to be funded through the federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program — and researchers say that buildout could generate millions of 811 locate tickets while increasing the risk of damaged underground utilities.

The warning came Thursday from the Advanced Connectivity Law and Policy Institute at New York Law School, which published an analysis of the construction pipeline BEAD is about to unleash across the United States.

What is the 811 system?

The 811 hotline is the national one-call service contractors must contact before digging. Each ticket triggers a utility locate — a visit by crews to mark buried gas, water, electric and telecommunications lines before a shovel enters the ground. More fiber construction means more digging, and more digging means more tickets and more chances for an excavator to strike something already in the ground.

The researchers' core arithmetic is straightforward. If BEAD funds over 270,000 miles of new buried fiber, and every trench mile requires at least one locate request along the route — and in practice many more, since routes cross jurisdictions and existing utilities — the program plausibly produces ticket volumes in the millions.

Why the timing matters

BEAD, administered by the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration, is the largest federal fiber subsidy program in U.S. history. Its construction phase is now moving from planning to permits and shovels, which means the 811 load the researchers describe is not hypothetical — it is the operational consequence of grants already committed.

The concern is capacity. State one-call centers and utility locating contractors were sized for historical dig volumes. A federally funded surge layered on top of routine excavation — road work, housing, gas lines — could stretch locate queues, delay construction schedules and, in the worst case, produce exactly the utility strikes the 811 system exists to prevent.

What the analysis does not say

The researchers do not provide a precise ticket estimate — "millions" is a projection from route mileage, not a modeled count. Nor does the analysis quantify how many additional utility strikes BEAD projects would cause, how much added delay contractors should expect, or which states' one-call systems face the tightest constraints.

Those gaps matter. "Likely to generate millions of 811 tickets" is a directional claim grounded in the 270,000-mile figure; it is not yet a state-by-state workload forecast that one-call centers or locators can plan against.

The analysis also leaves open the question of who bears the cost. Locate fees are typically paid by the excavator or facility owner depending on state law. BEAD grantees building hundreds of route-miles may find locate charges and wait times a material line item that federal grant budgets did not anticipate.

The regulatory backdrop

Underground damage prevention is governed by a patchwork of state one-call statutes, enforced with varying penalties and ticket rules. There is no federal mandate standardizing how broadband construction interacts with those systems, which means BEAD-funded builders will face 50 different compliance regimes as they deploy — a fact that compounds both the administrative burden and the strike risk the researchers flag.

What comes next

The practical test arrives as BEAD construction accelerates in the coming grant cycles. If ticket volumes and utility damage incidents climb in step with the 270,000-mile buildout, pressure will grow on states and federal overseers to fund one-call capacity and tighten damage-prevention rules before the program's fiber is fully in the ground.