By Glenn Wilson, Founder & CEO, MapItRight
For twenty years, the Geometric Network has been the quiet backbone of how American utilities and telecom operators map their infrastructure. It’s the data model inside Esri’s ArcGIS platform that tracks where every pole, conduit, splice point, and mile of fiber or pipe actually sits in the ground — the system of record engineers pull up before they dig, design, or dispatch a crew.
In March 2026, Esri retired it.
The replacement, Esri’s Utility Network, is a more capable piece of software on paper. In practice, it is not a plug-and-play upgrade — it’s a different data model entirely, and migrating a live utility or telecom network onto it is closer to a system replacement than a version bump. Industry estimates put the cost of a full migration between 500,000and500,000and1.5 million depending on network size, with timelines running six to eighteen months. For a mid-sized rural electric cooperative or regional fiber operator, that is not a rounding error in the IT budget — it’s a multi-year capital decision that has to happen now, whether or not it was planned for.
A deadline that doesn’t care about your budget cycle
What makes this different from a normal software sunset is timing. Most enterprise software transitions get planned years in advance, with vendors offering long overlap windows. Esri gave the market a defined retirement date, and every organization still running the Geometric Network — and there are thousands, spanning electric cooperatives, municipal utilities, gas distribution companies, and telecom outside-plant teams — is now on the clock simultaneously.
That’s created an unusual dynamic: a large, fragmented, historically slow-moving buyer segment (utility and telecom back-office IT) all shopping for the same category of software at the same time. Systems integrators who specialize in Esri migrations report booking out capacity months in advance. For an industry not known for moving fast, that’s a signal worth paying attention to.
The second wave: BEAD money is landing on the same desks
Compounding the timing problem, the federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program is disbursing tens of billions of dollars to expand fiber broadband into underserved parts of the country — money that flows to many of the same ISPs, cooperatives, and municipal broadband authorities now facing the Esri deadline.
BEAD grant recipients have to document network builds with a level of geographic precision the program requires for compliance and reporting. That means the same organizations forced to replace their Geometric Network infrastructure are, in many cases, also standing up new fiber network mapping systems from scratch to meet grant requirements — on the same timeline, with the same engineering staff, and often with the same budget line.
For software buyers in this position, the practical question isn’t “should we modernize our GIS” — that decision was made for them. It’s “do we spend $1M+ re-platforming onto a general-purpose enterprise GIS suite built for every utility vertical at once, or do we look at tools purpose-built for the fiber and telecom workflows we actually run.”
A market segment finally getting purpose-built tools
That question is opening space for a newer category of software: fiber and telecom-specific network mapping platforms designed around outside-plant workflows — splice tracking, strand management, as-built documentation, FTTH design — rather than the general-purpose GIS stack utilities have historically had to bend to fit their needs.
This is the gap MapItRight, the company I founded, was built to close. Rather than asking telecom and fiber teams to configure a broad enterprise GIS platform for their specific network model, MapItRight’s fiber network mapping software is built around how fiber operators, ISPs, and electric cooperatives actually plan, build, and document their networks — with the BEAD reporting and Esri-migration realities of 2026 factored in from day one, not bolted on after the fact.
The Geometric Network retirement will not be the last forcing function this industry sees. But it is, right now, the clearest signal that the tooling utilities and telecoms have relied on for two decades is being rebuilt — and the organizations that treat this as an opportunity to right-size their software to their actual workflow, rather than simply re-platforming onto the next version of what they already had, will be the ones who spend less and move faster through 2026 and beyond.
Glenn Wilson is the founder and CEO of MapItRight, a fiber network mapping and outside-plant management platform for ISPs, electric cooperatives, and telecom engineering firms.
