Grant-funded builds come with hard milestone dates. Design and permitting routinely consume months per market before a single foot of conduit goes in — and every week a design sits in queue is a week taken from the construction window.
The whole sector is competing for the same limited pool of OSP design engineers and consultants. Outsourced design runs weeks to months per market and is priced accordingly; hiring in-house is slow and hard to scale back down after the build wave.
Big-carrier design platforms are quote-only, per-seat, and assume months of consultant-led setup — a poor fit for a team that needs designs now, not a software implementation project.
A design that undercounts homes or understates footage becomes a mid-construction funding problem. You need numbers you can take to a board, a bank, or a state broadband office.
Buildability and coverage are directly measured; footage is an honest AACE-class estimate band (median absolute error 11.2%, misses skew to conservative overbuilds, every one published with its sign and size). Full methodology on the accuracy page.