Potentially apocryphal, but Telstra's copper cable network supposedly had its insulation made of paper, not rubber. I remember when it rained the curbside pits fill with water, causing slowdowns and frequent ADSL dropouts (until things dried out).
I have now learned that the WA state utilities commission is pretty interested when providers try to pull stunts like this. You can also dig out useful company contact information from the commission's website.
A number of years ago I worked at a CLEC, during that short window of time when they could exist. One of the more useful things I learned is how much power the PUC has. Every phone company has a team that deals with complaints coming in via the PUC and they are eager to resolve them. Not something I'd necessarily use in lieu of regular old customer service for most issues, but when the first and second attempts fail, calling the PUC will work 100% of the time.
If your POTS lines are down and the telecom company is telling you a "wet pulp repair" is underway, your phones are going to be down for a while because a bunch of paper-insulated cables need to be manually rewired because they got wet and corroded.
I found this interesting: http://etler.com/docs/bsp-archive/629/629-295-300_I3.pdf - guess it's standard practice to dry out the lines, wrap in cloth, put dessicant and then seal it.
In order to keep it dry, the conduit that the pulp lines are run through is pressurized to 5-10psi. Anyone that has worked with air compressors knows that pumping ambient pressurized air down into underground pipes is a recipe for condensation, so high capacity air driers are required to remove the water before it goes underground.
Any kind of outage on the compressor or dryer is effectively an emergency because water infiltration can happen almost immediately, creating an outage and extremely expensive repair.
Aka Cunningham’s law
> Any kind of outage on the compressor or dryer
I’m confused: isn’t a bigger concern any physical damage to the conduit anywhere in the run that is too large for the compressor to overcome? Or are we talking football-field-sized compressors here?
Plenty of opportunities for water ingress to still cause problems.
ADSL is basically modulating a radio wave over a cable directly to another device. Fiber requires high quality optics, high quality lasers, tons of active hardware if you want to do it at scale. (not to mention the mind boggling physics and manufacturing required for things like DWDM, optical path switching etc).
Fiber optics have existed since the 80's yes, but prices of high quality fiber solutions have only dropped massively in the last decade or so.
GPON makes this scalable and affordable, but at the cost of technical complexity. Fiber (as in, the cables themselves) is far cheaper to produce compared to copper, but this has mostly to do with the price of copper and not manufacturing techniques.
Historically there was a continuous upgrade of equipment as the technology improved. Manual exchanges became automatic, step-by-step gave way to cross-bar which gave way to electronic exchanges. Analog phones were replaced with digital and ADSL. And had that steady improvement continued, ADSL would have routinely been replaced with Optical fiber.
What stopped the perpetual upgrades was the arrival Thatcher/Regan/Howard and the advent of Neoliberalism. Which meant that anything which provided a Public Service (gasp Socialism!) was completely abandoned. We are only now starting to realise the long term cost of their vandalism.
My daughter is gonna grow up not knowing any of the “shared phone line” etiquette because it is largely obsolete.
Some of the first-hand accounts I’ve read talked about neighbours listening in on conversations. People could tell a snooper was on the line because the volume of the other caller would drop. There was a social aspect to the whole enterprise because you could tell the one nosy neighbour to get off the line and the volume would magically raise.
But there's a further point, the problem with moisture in the lines is the corrosion caused by electrolysis, which in turn is caused by the 50V DC on the lines. So even with modern plastic insulation, the copper would be corroded away by any electrolysis.
One last point: Rubber was almost never used as an insulator on phone lines.