What an outside-plant asset audit actually finds

Every outside-plant audit we've been part of starts the same way: somebody pulls the as-built drawings, assumes they're roughly right, and then a field crew opens a handhole and finds something different. The gap between what's on record and what's actually in the ground is the single most consistent finding across legacy municipal conduit systems, and it's rarely a minor discrepancy.

Occupied space that isn't marked, and marked space that isn't occupied

The most immediately expensive surprise is conduit occupancy. Records frequently show duct space as available when it's actually full — sometimes with cable that was never updated in the system, sometimes with capacity that a previous project consumed without the change making it back into the master records. The reverse also happens: ducts marked as occupied that are actually empty, because a segment was decommissioned years ago and nobody updated the drawing. Either error changes the answer to the question that usually triggers the audit in the first place: is there room in this corridor for a new build, or does it need a fresh trench.

Cable that was never removed

Abandoned cable left in place is close to universal in systems more than fifteen or twenty years old. It's rarely documented as abandoned — it's just absent from current records while still physically occupying duct space, and in some cases still connected to hardware that makes it look active on a quick visual check. Removing it is its own project, but knowing it's there, and where, is usually enough to unblock a design that would otherwise plan around phantom capacity constraints.

Vaults, handholes, and splice points that have moved

As-built locations for handholes and vaults drift from reality for mundane reasons: a road was widened, a structure was relocated during an unrelated utility project, or the original as-built was based on design intent rather than a post-construction survey. Splice point documentation has the same challenge — the paperwork says a splice closure is at one location, and the crew finds it forty metres away, or finds two closures where the record shows one.

Why this matters more than it used to

Under PSAB 3150, municipalities are already required to track, value, and maintain tangible capital assets, and underground conduit and outside-plant infrastructure fall squarely inside that requirement. An asset audit isn't just a pre-construction convenience anymore; it's the difference between an asset register that reflects reality and one that's a rough estimate carried forward from whoever last touched it. That matters for financial reporting, but it matters more operationally: a municipality that can tell a private carrier or a Broadband Fund applicant exactly what's available in a given corridor, with confidence, is a far more attractive dig-once or joint-use partner than one that can only offer a decades-old drawing and a promise to check.

The audits that hold up are the ones that combine a records review with actual field verification — vault by vault, duct by duct — rather than trusting either source alone. It's slower than a desktop review, and it's the only version of the exercise that produces a register anyone can actually build a project plan on.