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Keeping Our Customers Online

Overview

There are over 180 million utility poles across the United States. According to the US Department of Transportation, 6% of traffic fatalities from 2016-2018 involved a driver striking a pole. These incidents often occur during late nights or heavy traffic, when a 24/7/365 response team is crucial to speedy restorations.

Tilson Infrastructure’s Operations and Maintenance (“O&M”) staff are highly experienced telecom professionals aware of material lead times and the urgency to act quickly to get a network back online as soon as possible. Our Network Operations Center (“NOC”) is connected with local crews across the country who are contracted to respond to any malfunction or damage that assets may incur. Additionally, through our growing inventory and warehouse programs, we have spare equipment and priority ordering with many manufacturers.

Challenge

In 2023, a driver struck a Tilson Infrastructure pole in Denver, Colorado, taking a national carrier’s small cell down with it. Unfortunately, the driver fled the scene without leaving any identifying information. The damage included the small cell pole being catastrophically bent, equipment knocked down, and the pole’s foundation pulled out of the ground. The local police department investigated the accident and contacted the power company to shut the power off to the pole, as it was exposed and now a potential community hazard.

Thanks to our robust and proactive efforts to ensure all our assets are tagged with our contact info, Tilson Infrastructure immediately received notification via our NOC of the outage from the power company, allowing us to begin restoration efforts with our customer.

Solution

Our team instantly began the process of restorations, which started by notifying the carrier that a driver had struck a pole and their equipment was damaged and would need to be replaced and reinstalled. In addition, we worked directly with the local carrier representative on a logistics plan. Once we had all parties on board with a restoration plan, the physical tasks of repair could begin immediately.

The first thing we do for all infrastructure hits is ensure the site is secure and safe for the community. Since the power utility was already disconnected, we also cleaned the area of debris and taped off the area with safety signage to prevent injury to others.

To be as efficient as possible, our team conducted several additional tasks simultaneously:

For this pole, we had two permitting offices to coordinate with: the City of Denver and Colorado DOT (CDOT). Once we had clearance to build a replacement, a new pole and equipment were ordered. While the pole lead times have improved since 2020, getting the correct item delivered still takes time. In this case, we were thrilled to receive the new asset in only 45 days and complete the construction two weeks later.

We Can Help

Tilson Infrastructure is proud of our O&M program and the relief it provides our carriers to know that an expert team is always available. We can provide partial or full-service restoration, including line and antenna installation and network integration based on our customers’ preferences.

Pole Sales:

Email poles@tilsoninfrastructure.com to learn more about our current and upcoming inventory.

Tilson Infrastructure provides elemental infrastructure, including poles, towers, and fiber, to support carrier networks.  We aggressively focus on providing our customers with lower costs by combining or decoupling asset classes as needed. 

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