If there’s one thing we’ve learned from logging thousands of miles across North America over the past few months, it’s that the telecom and utility industries are feeling a very specific kind of pressure right now.
Everyone wants to build faster. But almost no one wants to keep building the old way.
Between March and May, our North American team hit the road. We set up shop at TechAdvantage in Nashville, joined the Fiber Broadband Association for our “Winning the BEAD Race” webinar, headed to Carlsbad for GLDS’ BroadHub Annual Meetup (BAM!), and met fiber leaders at Fiber Connect in Orlando.
Different cities. Different audiences. Different event formats.
But the same operational reality kept showing up:
- Network expansion targets are getting more ambitious.
- BEAD-funded deployment timelines are putting pressure on teams.
- Manual fiber design is slowing projects down before construction even starts.
- Field operations are becoming harder to coordinate in real time.
- Network data exists but too often, it’s fragmented, outdated, or hard to act on.
The industry isn’t short on vision. The real challenge is execution, and that’s exactly where our conversations focused.
Speed is now an operational requirement
At TechAdvantage 2026 in Nashville, the event theme was “Rise to Meet the Moment”. It fit the mood perfectly.
Utilities, broadband operators, and cooperatives are all being asked to modernize infrastructure while expanding connectivity, improving reliability, and doing more with limited engineering and field resources.
For many teams, the pressure isn’t coming from a lack of ambition. It’s coming from the gap between what the organization needs to deliver and what its current processes can realistically support.
Manual designs still take too long. Dispatching can become chaotic when priorities change in the field. Spatial data often lives across too many disconnected systems. And when teams are working under deadline pressure, these small inefficiencies compound quickly.
At our booth in Nashville, Bill Scheffler, Ian Oliver, and Joel Swanson spent the event showing practical ways to close that gap. Not through abstract future-state conversations, but through live demos of workflows that operators can actually use.
That included:
Fiber Design Engine
for automated FTTx/PON design and cost-optimized planning
GeoTask Field Service Management
for real-time scheduling and dispatching
The takeaway from TechAdvantage was clear: modernization isn’t just about having better technology. It’s about removing the daily friction that keeps good teams from moving at the speed their projects now require.
BEAD changed the conversation from “can we fund it?” to “can we deliver it?”
Shortly after TechAdvantage, we joined forces with the Fiber Broadband Association for our webinar: “Winning the BEAD Race: Automated Fiber Design & Integrated Network Inventory”.
For many broadband organizations, the funding conversation has moved into a new phase. Securing capital is a milestone, but it doesn’t automatically solve the delivery challenge.
The harder question now is:
How do you design, build, document, and report at BEAD scale without overwhelming your engineering teams?
During the webinar, Bill Scheffler and Ian Oliver walked through the operational bottlenecks we’re seeing across BEAD projects, including:
Slow manual design processes
When every high-level design depends on repetitive drafting, teams lose valuable time before construction even begins.
Limited engineering capacity
The volume of planned broadband deployment is increasing faster than the available pool of experienced engineering talent.
Fragmented network inventory
If design, construction, and asset data are disconnected, teams struggle to maintain a reliable source of truth.
Compliance and reporting pressure
NTIA and funding-related reporting requirements demand accurate, traceable data. Spreadsheets and scattered records make that harder than it needs to be.
The point of the webinar wasn’t simply “automation is faster”. That’s true, but it’s only part of the story. The bigger shift is moving from disconnected manual work to an integrated workflow where network planning, inventory, cost estimation, and reporting all support each other.
Automated Fiber Design and Integrated Network Inventory become especially valuable in this case. Together, they help teams generate high-level designs, create bills of materials, improve visibility, and keep project data aligned from planning through execution.
In other words: the BEAD race isn’t only about speed, but also building a process that can survive the pace.
At BAM! 2026, the focus was scaling without breaking what already works
At GLDS’ BroadHub Annual Meetup (BAM! 2026) in Carlsbad, California, the conversations became even more specific around broadband growth. Everyone likes the idea of scaling. But operators know the risk hiding underneath that word.
Growth can expose weak spots:
- incomplete inventory
- manual design dependencies
- disconnected customer, network, and field data
- limited visibility into what is actually deployed
- service continuity risks during expansion
That last point matters. Because broadband operators are not just building new networks. They are also protecting the customer experience on the networks they already run.
At BAM!, Ian Oliver met with operators to discuss how to scale with more confidence using NetStork and the Fiber Design Engine.
You cannot automate confidently if your inventory is unreliable. You cannot plan accurately if you don’t trust the underlying data. And you cannot protect service continuity if you’re guessing what assets exist, where they are, or how they connect.
The outcome operators are looking for is not just “faster design”, but a more reliable operating model:
- complete and accurate network visibility
- automated, cost-optimized high-level designs
- complete bills of materials
- fewer blind spots during expansion
- better continuity between planning and operations
Fiber Connect 2026: getting “Light Years Ahead” of manual planning
By the time we arrived at Fiber Connect 2026 in Orlando, the same theme had sharpened even further.
The event theme, “Light Years Ahead”, captured the ambition of the fiber industry. But on the show floor, many conversations came back to one very practical challenge:
Why does planning the network still take so long?
At Booth #238, Joel Swanson, Ian Oliver, and Bill Scheffler showed how Globema’s solutions help operators rethink that process.
With NetStork enhanced by the Fiber Design Engine, teams can automate and accelerate high-level fiber network design, generate cost-optimized plans, and produce complete BOMs much faster than traditional manual approaches.
Once crews are in the field, another set of challenges appears:
How do you assign work efficiently when priorities shift?
How do you collect field data without creating another data mess?
How do you keep operations connected to the network model?
How do you maintain service continuity while building quickly?
Tools like GeoTask, GlobIQ, and GeoGrid became part of the conversation right there. Because faster design is powerful, but it becomes even more valuable when connected to field execution, spatial intelligence, and real-time operational decision-making.
Where we go from here
The main takeaway from our spring 2026 tour is simple: speed is now the defining metric of success, but working harder won’t get us there. The issue isn’t money or ambition, but the process.
Thank you to everyone who swung by our booths, booked a 1-on-1, or tuned into our FBA webinar. The conversations were invaluable. If you’re ready to stop drawing fiber by hand and want to explore how integrated network inventory and automated design can transform your operations, we’re always here to map out a smarter workflow.
