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Rob Laudati, who joined the executive team at Render Networks last year, said fiber network builders often face ballooning labor and material costs, leading to fears that some projects may become unprofitable.
Despite a resistance to new technology in the telecommunications industry, many firms eventually reach a tipping point caused by market pressures that causes them to look at new solutions to increase efficiency.
That’s according to Rob Laudati, the vice president of product and partnerships at Render Networks, which offers a construction and maintenance platform to help fiber-network builders maximize efficiencies. Laudati spoke to Broadband Communities this week and said some of the challenges being faced by network builders are causing some state broadband offices to get nervous.
“There’s a fixed amount of revenue out there,” Laudati said. “Labor costs are increasing and the supply is decreasing. Materials are increasing.”
Laudati said grant money for future broadband builds is being allocated from 2024 budgets, despite the fact that many projects won’t begin construction for another year or so.
“What’s going to happen to those costs and that labor supply in the next 16 to 18 months,” Laudati asked. “It’s not going to get better. It’s going to get worse. So, efficiency now becomes really, really important.”
In his travels, Laudati said he has been hearing state broadband offices “getting a little bit nervous that the grantees will walk away from projects if they find at that time that those projects are not going to return any value.”
“That’s a real concern I think that’s growing as the time lapse grows between budget and build,” Laudati said.
Render is targeting subgrantees with their construction-management solutions. Laudati said subgrantees are “the most likely customer of Render.”
Laudati said that crowd includes small ISPs and telcos that might be building broadband networks for the first time.
“They’re looking for support and know how,” he said.
Laudati said there is competition for what Render Networks offers, but he said he believes what differentiates Render is the company’s approach to understanding how to build networks efficiently, and the priority the company’s solution places on getting customers connected in the shortest period of time possible.
“Everybody has a competitor and we certainly do,” he said. “There are five or six companies that we run into out in the market.”
The company’s construction and maintenance platforms utilize “end-to-end automation,” according to the company’s website, and aims to keep construction crews on track “with automated work scope creation, real-time geospatial visibility and a single view of end-to-end performance.”
