[LINK] Ever-lasting copper

[Richard]

Well, you could stop bothering to try to teach sense to idiots.

But I have a real, current and close experience. Lightning. A lightning 
strike in Wentworth Falls - one lightning strike - destroyed the 
insulation in a cable run. I spent Monday afternoon with a Telstra tech, 
starting at the termination point at my business and working back to 
find where the damage ended.

The result of this one lightning strike is that a 100-metre cable run 
has been rendered useless. There is one good pair left, which happened 
to belong to my neighbour. I just happened to be the first to complain - 
and the result will be that Telstra has to trench new cable for the 
whole run.

The copper *network* could be maintained forever, but only with regular 
maintenance and replacement. Some of that is that to keep copper in 
pristine conditions, you have to provide it with an ideal environment. 
That means doing things like giving it a pressurised environment (which 
costs money).

Optical fibre, on the other hand, is nowhere near as fussy. There is a 
Corning study which I've linked to before here, in which a fibre cable 
was retrieved after 20 years of flood-heat cycles, in which the glass 
showed no measurable deterioration from when it was new.

You might also think about this: Australia has zero copper-based 
submarine cables still in service. On the other hand, I am not aware 
that Australia has *ever* decommissioned a submarine fibre.

RC

On 8/01/14 9:34 PM, David Boxall wrote:
> I'm slowly getting ground down by opponents of FTTP. The latest is an
> assertion that copper telecommunications cabling lasts forever.
>
> When the infrastructure in my area was replaced, my neighbour reported
> being shown old copper that appeared crystalline; possibly some form of
> metal fatigue. I have no clue about these things. Can anyone enlighten
> me on how copper degrades over time?
>