By Jason Jorgensen, Senior Vice President, Long Haul Deployment
So you want to build a long-haul fiber route.
You’ve got capital. A spreadsheet. Maybe a contractor lined up. You’re eyeing a route and thinking: How hard can it be?
At Zayo, we’ve been doing this for 20 years – across mountains, deserts, canyons, railroads, protected lands, flood zones, and tribal jurisdictions. We’ve worked through fires, lawsuits, supply chain collapses, vendor complications, and the occasional mudslide.
Here’s the hard truth: building long-haul at scale requires more than just the right contractors and capital. It demands equal parts strategy, deep experience, and grit – and a rare few have what it takes to succeed.
The Illusion of the Straight Line
On paper, it looks simple: draw a line. Pull permits. Hire a contractor. Build. Enjoy the fruits of your labor.
The reality is far more complex. No matter your level of preparation, you’re bound to encounter several obstacles. Permits don’t show up, partners run out of money, or regulations change mid-project. Environmental monitors find a tin can, and your entire route is suddenly shut down because it might be an artifact.
And those obstacles don’t just cost time, they burn capital. Delays compound, contracts get renegotiated, and your budget assumptions start to unravel. If you don’t know how to see it coming and solve it fast, you fall behind. And falling behind can cost you everything.
The Hits Keep Coming: Stories from the Front Lines
I’m sharing these stories to make one thing clear: if the returns in the Excel model look too good to be true, the reality is likely much different. Long-haul doesn’t reward optimism—it punishes it.
We Own a Horse Ranch
We needed an ILA site. Nothing was available at the proper spacing near the route with access to adequate power. So, after quickly confirming there were no other viable options, we bought a horse ranch — at a substantial price tag, that was still the least painful option. The good news is we found a farmer to cut and bail hay on the ranch to keep the fire danger down.
The Phantom Fiber Scam
A vendor’s subcontractor wanted to get paid, but really didn’t want to do the work. So, they shoved fiber ends into conduits to fake fiber placement production. On paper: fiber was placed. In reality: zero fiber was placed. We and our general contractor found out the hard way.
Monsoon Mayhem
Building through unforgiving, solid mountainside along I-70 on our route from Denver to Salt Lake City, a wildfire sparked from nearby power lines and crews were evacuated. Then came the monsoon. Mudslides wiped out freshly placed fiber. Six-inch steel casings were twisted like licorice. This amounted to a five-month delay. We had to fully rebuild the section, but only after the area was stabilized and made safe.
Railroad Ransom
Mid-way through a build, a railroad operator jacked up our right of way (ROW) fees by 10x. After unproductive negotiations, we walked. We self-constructed an entirely new route using the railroad ROW – because negotiating was slower than rebuilding.
The Vendor Vanish Act
A vendor goes Chapter 11 and falsifies invoices to build up the payables owed by Zayo to influence the judge. Meanwhile, subcontractors and materials suppliers are filing liens on the railroad ROW which in turn causes the railroads to shut us down until resolved. This delays construction by months while we deal with legal warfare and clean up the mess. Eventually the vendor goes Chapter 7 which allows us to re-award to a new vendor and we wrap up the project.
And we haven’t even touched inflation, supply chain shortages, fiber defects during final testing, or the thrill of discovering another utility drilled through your newly completed system. Each one of these disasters has a common thread: they’re expensive. And they don’t just stretch timelines — they kill your returns.
Why Zayo Is Still Standing
At Zayo, we use the motto Hell for Leather – because we’re moving fast at top speed to build long haul boldly and strategically, pushing the limits of what we thought was possible.
We don’t pretend we’re perfect. We’ve taken our lumps. Early in our journey, we made plenty of our own mistakes. We drew a line on a map and figured it out later. We learned the hard way.
But we did learn – and we adapted fast.
We more than doubled our long-haul team, built scalable processes, and institutionalized how we manage projects and problems. We have dry powder in our budgets to absorb chaos without grinding to a halt. And most importantly: we built a culture that doesn’t flinch when things go sideways. More so, we actively seek out problems before they manifest so we can solve them before they become big problems.
I’ll Let You in on a Secret…
If someone says they can build faster, it usually means they missed something that will come back and bite them later.
Maybe they didn’t factor in tribal negotiations. Or plan for hundreds of permits…including the nine-month BLM review. Or account for what happens when the fiber shows up defective. Or when their contractor disappears. Or when a tin can pops up on their route and becomes a cultural shutdown.
They didn’t budget for that, didn’t ask the right questions, and didn’t know what they didn’t know. Long-haul work can be profitable, but it’s easy to fall behind – and once you’re behind, you likely won’t catch up.
Anyone Can Map a Route. Many Won’t Survive it.
A lot of folks see long-haul fiber and smell opportunity. Massive demand. High-capacity pricing. AI. Cloud. Edge. Infrastructure tailwinds.
It looks like a fast ROI — until the delays or unexpected costs hit.
Until one wrong assumption causes plans to go awry, permits stall, a $500,000 fix turns into a $5 million reroute, or until you’re six months in and already bleeding margin before a single customer lights up.
Long-haul isn’t a quick way to make a buck. It’s a slow, brutal way to lose one if you don’t know what you’re doing. In fact, Zayo has acquired the assets of more than one ambitious long-haul constructor who had big dreams and big eyes but got lost in the wilderness on the way to the Promised Land.
Anyone can map a route but actually building it is a different story entirely.
The Hard-Knock Advantage
At Zayo, we’ve earned our stripes the hard way—through the kind of challenges you can’t read about in a manual and can only learn by experience. Every delay, every blown budget, every “what now?” moment has helped us write the playbook.
Today, those hard-won lessons are embedded into everything we do. We’ve built the processes, the expertise, and the resilience to deliver long-haul routes consistently, no matter the terrain—literal or figurative. And when we deliver, it’s not just about connecting Point A to Point B. It’s about creating the infrastructure that connects what’s next.
Because we’ve navigated the long-haul wilderness, we now have a clear path forward, building the infrastructure that fuels the future – whether it’s AI shaping new industries, e-learning connecting minds across the globe, or innovations still on the horizon.