A Note from Our CEO

I've spent the better part of three decades building and operating fiber networks globally as a vendor, contractor, technology partner, ISP, and software house. I've watched this industry go through cycles of enthusiasm and reckoning. What's happening right now feels like both at once.

More capital is flowing into broadband than at any point in history. And yet the conversations I'm having with contractors, operators, and builders across four continents keep circling back to the same frustrations we had ten years ago: documentation that doesn't match the field, payments that take months, and projects where the gap between "completed" and "accepted" is where margin goes to die and rollout programs stall leaving end customers without the connection they are longing for and the network owners with capital deployed but insuffiecient revenues..

We started OciusX because we lived through these problems. We didn't set out to build software; we built an internal tool because we were tired of losing money to paperwork that couldn't keep up with our crews. That tool became a company because, it turns out, every contractor we talked to had the same problem.

The OX Factor is back. This is OciusX giving back and sharing what we see from the trench, from project data, and from the operators and contractors we work alongside every day.

We're not going to hype anything. We're going to tell you what's actually happening and how we believe we can make fiber network operations financially viable across the ecosystem.

— Pär Cedergren, CEO and Co-Founder, Ocius-X

✅ Reality Check

Fifty of 56 BEAD state proposals have been approved by the NTIA. The first federally funded projects are expected to break ground this year. Between BEAD allocations and ISP matching funds, more than $50 billion in broadband construction is expected to compress into the 2026–2028 window.

That's not a pipeline. That's a pressure cooker.

And the industry isn't ready for what's about to happen, not because it can't build, but because it can't document, verify, and get paid fast enough to sustain the pace.

Here's the math that should concern everyone: the U.S. is currently short approximately 58,000 skilled fiber workers. The Fiber Broadband Association estimates the industry needs over 200,000 new positions to absorb BEAD-driven demand. Labor already accounts for 64% of aerial fiber project costs and 72% of underground builds. Entry-level fiber workers are commanding $60,000 with overtime, and experienced splicers are seeing 25–30% pay increases year over year.

So we have record money chasing a shrinking labor pool. What happens next is predictable: the contractors who can actually mobilize and execute will be stretched across too many projects. And every day they wait for payment on a completed project is a day they can't staff the next one.

This is the part of the broadband story that doesn't make the press releases. The money is real. The timelines are real. But the infrastructure to turn construction activity into approved, documented, payable work? That's where the system breaks.

🔀 The Uncomfortable Truth

The BEAD restructuring that hit in June 2025 was supposed to streamline things. What it actually did was force every state to redo its subgrantee selection process within 90 days, eliminate prevailing wage requirements, and open the door to satellite and unlicensed fixed wireless bids alongside fiber.

The stated goal was cost efficiency. The practical effect was chaos.

States that had spent two years building fiber-first deployment plans were told to start over and prioritize the lowest-cost bids. Fiber applicants who had invested months in proposals watched as LEO satellite providers entered bids for the same locations. Some fiber bidders dropped out entirely.

And buried in the restructuring is a contractor economics problem that few seemed to focus on. When you strip labor protections and optimize for the cheapest bid, you compress the margins of the people who actually build the network. That's not theoretical. The tower industry went through exactly this cycle - matrix pricing, squeezed contractors, companies folding, and employment hitting 20-year lows.

The uncomfortable truth is this: BEAD was designed to close the digital divide. But if the people doing the construction can't sustain healthy economics, if payment cycles stretch to 60 or 90 days, if documentation disputes eat margin, if workforce protections get traded for cost savings - you don't get a connected America. You get a construction bubble that burns through contractors and leaves half-finished networks behind.

The money isn't the hard part. Execution is the hard part. It always was.

🌎️ Global Patterns

Across Northern Europe, operators are expanding fiber capacity to support hyperscale and AI growth. No headlines. No subsidy cycles. Just pulling higher-count fiber through ducts installed years ago.

What stands out isn’t the capital. It’s the discipline.

Work is captured in the field.
Documentation is immediate.
Payment follows verification with no debate.

Fiber has been treated as long-term utility infrastructure there for over a decade. That mindset compounds. Different markets. Different regulations. Same physics.

When execution discipline improves, margins improve.

That’s not a regional lesson.

It’s an infrastructure principle.

🏢 From the Field 🏠️ 

A contractor we work with completed a 14-mile fiber build for a regional ISP in the Southeast last fall. Splicing was done. Testing was done. The network was lit and passing traffic.

Payment hadn't arrived four months later.

The holdup wasn't a dispute about quality. It wasn't a budget problem. It was documentation. The closeout package required as-built drawings in a format the operator's system couldn't ingest. Progress photos existed but were scattered across crew members' phones and a shared Dropbox folder that couldn't be tied to specific splice points or footage markers. The operator's project manager spent three weeks trying to reconcile what was built against what was designed, and kept finding gaps.

Not gaps in the work. Gaps in the evidence that the work happened.

The contractor carried $180,000 in unbilled labor and materials for four months. They shifted two crews to other projects to cover payroll. One of those crews didn't come back.

This isn't rare. According to recent industry data, 70% of contractors regularly face delayed payments. Among those experiencing delays, 56% say they shift workers to other projects, and 21% pause work entirely until payment clears.

The work got done. The documentation didn't keep up. And the contractor paid the price, literally.

The Bottom Line

The next three years will see more broadband construction activity than any period in American history. That's not a prediction. The money is allocated, the proposals are approved, and ground is about to break.

The question isn't whether we can build the networks. We have the engineering talent, the equipment, and if we're honest about workforce development, enough time to train the people we need.

The question is whether the space between "work completed" and "payment received" can survive the volume. Because right now, that space is held together with spreadsheets, photo dumps, and project managers working nights to reconstruct what should have been captured in the field.

That gap isn't administrative. It's structural. And the structure can be fixed.

Where to Find Us

Pär and the OciusX team will be at Metro Connect USA in Fort Lauderdale, February 23–25. If you're one of the 3,500+ executives, operators, and builders at this year's event and want to talk about what execution actually looks like when $50 billion hits the ground come find us. No pitch deck required. Just a real conversation about the part of the deployment that happens after the press release.

We'll be back in two weeks.

-OciusX

Got a topic you'd like to see us dive into? Reach out! Otherwise, we’ll see you in the next edition.