They're Already Digging
You're standing in your kitchen on a Saturday morning with a cup of coffee, and you hear a drill.
Someone you've never seen is mounting a box to the outside of your building. Nobody told you they were coming. Nobody told your board. There's no work plan, no notice, and no agreement on file that says who fixes it if it leaks.
I'm watching this happen right now at a condominium association I work with. It is not an isolated incident.
There is a fiber construction wave rolling across the entire Front Range. Intrepid Fiber Networks has built or announced networks in Lafayette, Louisville, Westminster, Northglenn, Littleton, Superior, Broomfield, Columbine Valley and Dakota Ridge, and picked up existing network assets in Thornton and Greenwood Village. Metronet has an $18 million build approved in Thornton and a $38 million build in Castle Rock and Castle Pines, and is expanding in Aurora and Westminster. BAM Broadband started construction last month in Castle Pines, with Cottonwood, Castle Rock and The Pinery to follow. And AT&T closed its $5.75 billion purchase of Lumen's residential fiber business in February, with Denver among the metros it picked up.
Now look at that list again. Thornton and Westminster are each getting two separate builds from two different companies. So are Castle Rock and Castle Pines. Which means some associations will do all of this twice — two agreements, two sets of crews, two sets of wall penetrations, a year or two apart, with nobody coordinating between them and no institutional memory of what the first company promised.
Most boards are finding out the same way. After the hole.
The business model is footage, and restoration is what gets sacrificed
This is the thing I most want boards to understand, and it isn't an accusation. It's just how the work is priced.
A fiber buildout is a production job. The crews are measured and paid on output — feet of conduit in the ground, homes passed, boxes hung, units lit. That's why the buildout moves as fast as it does, and there's nothing sinister about it. But every incentive in that model points in one direction, and the single task with no production value attached to it is putting your property back the way they found it.
Watch what that does on the ground. A crew that's behind schedule does not cut corners on the fiber. The fiber has to work. Somebody tests it, somebody lights it, and somebody gets a call if it doesn't.
So the corners get cut on everything nobody tests.
The compaction in the trench. The sealant around the penetration in your wall. The sod that gets thrown back down over loose fill. The sprinkler head they clipped and didn't mention. The paint that's close enough. Every one of those items shares two features: there's no acceptance step attached to it, and nobody is standing there when it's done.
That's not a bad company. That's an unsupervised one.
Here's what I'd want every board and manager to understand before the crews reach your property.
The logo on the truck is not the company you're dealing with
This one costs boards weeks.
Say the trucks and door hangers in your community say T-Mobile Fiber. That tells you almost nothing about who is actually digging, and here's how strange it gets.
In the north metro, those networks are largely Intrepid Fiber Networks — an open-access builder that sells wholesale capacity to internet providers, with T-Mobile signed on as an anchor tenant. There, T-Mobile is a customer of the company holding the shovel.
Down in Castle Rock and Castle Pines, T-Mobile Fiber service is likely to run over Metronet, which a T-Mobile and KKR joint venture bought outright in July 2025 and now runs as a wholesale builder with T-Mobile Fiber as the retail face. There, T-Mobile is a co-owner.
Same brand on the marketing. Two entirely different companies, two different license agreements, two different sets of contractors. In both cases the crew on your property is a contractor working for the network builder — often a layer or two further down than that.
So when your board fires off an angry email to the name on the truck, there's a good chance it lands somewhere with no authority over the crew at all.
Whoever is building in your community, the first question is the same, and it goes in writing before anything else: who is the legal entity, and what document do they say gives them the right to be here? Your city's license agreement is a public record. Start there.
Your property is three zones, and they have three different answers
Crews behave as though the entire community is public right-of-way. It isn't. And the most common mistake I see boards make is spending all their energy in the zone where they have no say, then signing away the zone that actually matters.
Zone 1 — the public right-of-way. Colorado law gives telecom and broadband providers the right to construct and operate facilities along, across, upon, above and under any public highway in the state, and declares that a matter of statewide concern (C.R.S. § 38-5.5-103). Cities handle it through license agreements. Your association has no veto here, and no amount of board energy will create one. Don't spend leverage on the street.
Zone 2 — platted and declaration easements. This one depends entirely on recorded language. A broad "public utilities" dedication on the plat will often cover underground fiber; a narrower one may not. And here's the document boards almost never check: your declaration. Many Colorado declarations carry a blanket easement over the common elements for utility or communications providers, frequently reserved by the developer. If yours is broad, your leverage narrows to reasonable use and proper restoration — which is still real leverage, and it's the part I care about anyway.
Zone 3 — your buildings and common elements. Mounting an access box, drilling through siding, running conduit up a wall — that is almost never inside a platted easement. In a condominium, the exterior is common element. In a townhome community, you're generally looking at both the owner and the association, because architectural control still governs the exterior.
And note this, because it comes up constantly: a homeowner who orders service consents to a drop to their unit. That is not consent to penetrate siding the association owns and maintains. Two different decisions, made by two different parties.
Nobody in this chain works for you
Compare this to every other project your association runs.
Normally you have the most reliable quality control there is — you're the one writing the checks. A contractor who wants the next phase, the referral, the reference from your community manager has a direct commercial interest in your board being satisfied. You barely have to exercise that leverage. It's just there, humming in the background, quietly fixing a hundred small things that never rise to a conversation.
Here, none of it exists. The company paying for this work doesn't live in your community and has never seen it. Your satisfaction isn't a line item in anyone's business plan. There's no next job to win from you, no reference to protect, no relationship to preserve.
Take all of that away and what's left is only what you wrote down, and whoever you've got watching.
Zone 3 is where the money is
Every penetration is a future water claim. A box mounted to a wall without an approved flashing and sealing detail is a path into an assembly your reserves are responsible for. It will not leak this month. It will leak in year four, and the crew that made it will be in another state.
It can void your cladding warranty. If your community re-clad or repainted in the last few years, an unapproved penetration through that assembly can take the manufacturer's warranty with it. You paid real money for that warranty. Somebody with a cordless drill is spending it.
811 does not mark your utilities. Locates cover member utilities. Your irrigation mains, site lighting circuits, private laterals, and anything installed after the original plat typically go unmarked — which is exactly why they get struck. The excavator still owes reasonable care, but you're the one with a severed irrigation main in July. If you have record drawings, get them into the locator's hands before the first shovel, and make that an obligation in writing.
Restoration is not backfill. It's compaction that holds through two winters, sod that takes, an asphalt patch that doesn't ravel, and paint that matches. Define it, define who accepts it, and hold security until it's accepted.
Notice what none of this is: a board failure. When an agreement arrives, it goes to association counsel, who reviews indemnity, insurance, liability and term — correctly, and well. Nobody was assigned to read it as a construction document. So the notice period, the work plan, the penetration detail, the restoration standard and the stop-work language go unexamined. There's no technical seat at the table unless somebody puts one there.
What belongs in the agreement
Negotiate; don't sign their form. At minimum: advance notice to the association and to affected owners · a work plan submitted and approved before each phase · written installation standards, including an association-approved penetration detail · a restoration standard with deadlines · a warranty on penetrations and restoration · indemnity and insurance naming the association as additional insured · as-builts showing location and depth · removal if the facilities are abandoned · remediation of anything already installed without authority · and reimbursement of your legal and owner's-rep review costs.
One structural note worth knowing: since 2022, FCC rules have barred providers from entering or enforcing exclusive and graduated revenue-sharing arrangements with the owners of multi-unit properties. Build your agreement around standards and cost recovery, not around getting paid for access.
Where your leverage actually is
It's highest before installation, and it collapses after. Once the fiber is in the ground and on the wall, you don't have terms. You have a damage claim.
Use the city. Your municipality's license agreement and the permit drawings are public records — request them and read them. Many of these agreements carry insurance requirements, a bond, and restoration deadlines the city itself can enforce, and some of that protection reaches private property. Find out what yours says. The right-of-way inspector is a faster pressure point than anything your board will generate on its own.
Make them show authority. Ask in writing for the recorded easement — with its reception number — or a signed agreement, for each area they intend to work. If nothing covers your common elements, say that in writing.
Don't send board members or residents to confront crews. It's a civil matter, it escalates badly, and it weakens you later.
And a flat "no" is usually the wrong play. Some of your owners want this service. Conditional access on strong written standards protects the buildings and keeps the board defensible. Refuse outright only if they won't accept reasonable terms.
Now the self-serving part — and the surprise at the end of it
I'm an owner's rep. So when I tell you the answer to a production-driven crew is somebody on your side watching the work, you should hear that for exactly what it is.
Read it anyway, because the arithmetic is the whole point.
What that role actually does here is narrow and unglamorous. Review the right-of-entry agreement as a construction document, alongside — not instead of — what your attorney is already doing. Document the property's existing condition before the first shovel, so a damage claim starts from a record instead of a disagreement. Review the plan before each dig. Be on site while the work is open. Verify restoration before anyone gets released.
None of that is exotic. It's the ordinary discipline you'd apply to a project you hired, applied to one you didn't.
Here's the part boards don't expect. In our experience, the installer will often pay for it.
That sounds backwards until you look at it from their side. They are trying to move through your community quickly. What actually costs them money is a stop-work order, an angry board, a damage claim six months later, and a community whose residents won't sign up. Funding a review and some oversight is cheap next to any one of those. It buys them a predictable path through your property and somebody to resolve problems with in real time instead of by letter.
So put it in the agreement. Right alongside reimbursement of your legal costs, make the association's construction review and observation a condition of entry, paid by the applicant. The worst outcome is they say no and you decide whether to fund it yourself. We've found they're usually more willing than boards assume — because a smooth buildout is worth more to them than the fee.
The bigger point
Your association would spend three months vetting a contractor it hired — references, insurance, bid leveling, interviews — and then hold real leverage over that contractor for the life of the job. A contractor you didn't hire showed up, the vetting dropped to zero, and the leverage was never there to begin with. Not because anyone decided that. Because there's no process for a project the association didn't start.
I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Whether a particular easement covers fiber turns on the exact recorded language, and that's a question for your association's counsel reading your actual plat and declaration. What I do is everything after that question is answered — the standards, the penetration detail, the restoration, and whether anyone is watching when it happens.
If a carrier, utility or developer has handed your board an agreement, get it reviewed as a construction document before it's signed. It costs a fraction of one repaired wall — and there's a good chance it doesn't cost you at all.
Next time: if the city isn't checking the quality of the work, who is?
Sean Davis, PMP | Civil Engineer | Owners Representative for HOA's and their Community Managers | Current HOA Board Member (12 years) | DHA Construction Management | Broomfield, CO
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