this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
336 points (83.9% liked)
Technology
70528 readers
3112 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I remember when phone lines were made of copper. We were sure that it would be impossible for everyone to have a phone.
Only in first-world countries did everyone have a phone and the Earth's population was half what it is now.
There's a lot of copper pairs left underground. Many hundreds of thousands of kilometres of it. Use it as a pull-through for fibre-optic bundles, and everyone can have gigabit internet.
Seriously though, there'll come a time when that underground obsolete copper will become economic to retrieve.
One of my family members had that job for a good while. What's interesting is the phone companies did not keep great records of what's copper and where it is, so a lot of it is likely to remain in place for a long time. Something else he has seen is thieves cutting fiber, thinking it is copper, and causing outages, although that is less frequent than it was years ago.
All kinds of copper are economic to retrieve with enough crack