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Where to begin, oh yeah, let’s work from the carrier back, and you will see how if one cog in the machine gets lazy, greedy, or pissed off, then it creates a domino effect.
First off, years ago the carriers would delay final sign offs, close out acceptance, and more to delay payments. Not one of them, almost all of them. They could delay your payments by months, literally because they insisted on sending their person to each site. This eventually faded away, mainly because the better crews stopped doing carrier work.
Carriers may be delayed, but the way deployments go today they know they have to pay the crews to maintain continuity. That’s why they prefer to deal with turf vendors, tower companies, and OEMs. They can offload quite a bit of cost and responsibility. Win-win for them.
Let’s talk about the turf vendors, including services, OEMs and tower companies. Not tower crews, but the American Tower’s and Crown Castle’s of the industry. They cleaned up their act in the past eight years, impressively, and they respect their vendors. It’s nice to see.
However, back in the early 2000’s and again in the 2010 rollout, many turf vendors would do the following: just not pay crews and have standby crew ready and waiting, remove milestones and offer to pay upon completion, maybe they would pay and maybe they wouldn’t.
Chicken feed maneuver, meaning the turf vendor would give them a little, a percentage, but refuse to pay unless they commit to five or more sites, then pay them a little at a time. Many crews held on to the dream of getting paid right up until they went under. I had this happen to me and luckily, we were diversified enough to stop work immediately and walk off the site. Then we got paid to finish.
Failing the closeout walk. This was a common mistake that crews made. The turf vendor would miss something on the checklist or just not approve it. Sometimes they would do it not to pay them and sometimes the crew missed stuff and sometimes the crew just dropped the ball. No one person is to blame here.
Quality audit failures. These could be legit or a reason not to pay. That’s why third parties started doing QA walks and providing the carrier with the results in addition to the turf vender.
For a while some CSPs/Turf/OEMs would not accept any CRs. If you’ve ever done work at a tower site, you know this is just crazy. It’s part of the business. The changes would drive the crews to walk off the site, quit, or go under.
All parties depended on each other. Climbers leave the industry now knowing there is not a bright future in this industry. They realize, in many cases, it’s just a paycheck, not a career.
Of course, history repeats itself. When the deployments dropped off, the workers were let go, again. They will all leave the industry and we’ll probably start over next time, if there is a next time.
To be clear, I am not pointing fingers, only pointing out what I have seen over the last 30 years. It’s a shame this industry remains somewhat of a mess, but it’s cyclical work. That’s what happens, much like building construction.
The telecom industry has faced a domino effect of challenges, from carriers delaying payments to turf vendors engaging in dubious practices. This has led to a cascade of issues affecting everyone from tower companies to individual crews. The collective nature of the problems, emphasizing that it’s not just one group at fault. The self-correcting nature of the market, which eventually finds balance.
Be smart and be safe!
By Wade Sarver, Wade4Wireless
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