A little more than a year ago, Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens told the Senate Commerce Committee that America's legacy copper telecommunications cable designed for an era of analog voice communications poses a major obstacle to the wider deployment of fiber optic-based digital broadband infrastructure that the nation needs now and in the future.
Legacy copper cable is also creating a choke point for emerging wireless broadband providers who can't get sufficient backhaul over 1970s era copper T-1 lines that provide a narrow pipe of only 1.5Mbs.
While certainly not by design, the recent rapid run up of the price of scrap copper could help expedite the needed transition from copper to fiber and speed the deployment of fiber. The reason: high copper prices have spawned a wave of theft of aerial copper telecommunications cable that an AT&T official told American Public Media's Marketplace program today is "almost at epidemic levels" and getting worse.
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