Network management Toolkit

Story: Government may back fibre rollout to homes

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Copper?

Note: I'm no network / communications engineer

In previous years, in Scotland and in the South East of England I've been lucky enough to meet a BT engineer, in the flesh, to talk to. These people are so much more interesting than the automatons at the end of a phone (different subject). In both locations I've been the victim of aluminium cables.

The story I was offered was - during periods of low availability for metals like copper (circa Second World War etc) aluminium was used to build some of the cable infrastrucure at lower cost in the UK.

Unfortunately aluminium doesn't have the great physical properties of copper especially after a few years in the ground and it's been demonstrating its fragility to digital users for many years now.

So it would be an interesting to understand how much of the ageing infrastructure is composed this way and where it is. It isn't all copper and it probably isn't as good as copper for the job we expect of it now.

I live in a rural area within the usual short distance that makes it look as though we should be able to enjoy RADSL. Even BT Broadband Sales insist it's the case on repeated sales calls. But the engineers cannot get it to me, hampered by a dodgey cable infrastructure.

I have no commercial proposition. So I expect that's it - until we move or shell-out for a satellite solution, we'll continue with slow modems (nearly unusable for web browsing - certainly unusable for dowloads) and the post (another service in decline).

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