Thursday, April 17, 2008

Coppers and robbers

Northlanders should take this as a hint.

Hell, AT&T should, too.

For the second time in the last few weeks, someone swiped a length of telephone line, presumably to sell the copper wire therein.
This is the second phone outage caused by copper thieves in recent weeks. On March 29, thieves stole several hundred feet of cable from 43rd Street and Pittman Road in Kansas City. ...

Meanwhile, the demand for copper is on the rise and the price could rise to $5 a pound in six months. Currently, copper costs $3.85 a pound.
This is a sign to AT&T -- and all of you Luddites for that matter -- who are still living in the 1960s (the decade in which the aforementioned telephone lines were installed).

The message is this: Get with the freakin' times, man!

This the 21st century! It's almost 2010, fer cryin' out loud. And we may not have flying cars (yet), but we've had wireless telephone technology for the last 20 years.

Buy a cell phone.

There are great deals out there. The networks are solid and with copper wire pushing $4 a pound (that's like five times more expensive than air) it just seems more efficient to go wireless.

I'm telling you, in this day and age, there's no reason to be connected by a wire to anything.

Just make sure you have an extra battery.

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5 comments:

  1. Honestly, the guy that KMBC was interviewing about this issue saying that apparently his work was trying to get a hold of him, and there was some "emergency" and all, and they couldn't because of the stolen copper thing?

    Dude. Doooooode. Buy a fucking cell phone. Backasswards dope.

    And the fact that it was such a HUGE story for them at 10 p.m. last night? Either makes me worried about what actual news might be slipping by them, or I didn't realize I'd travelled back in time throughout the day and wound up in 1965. Because really? REALLY? That was the top news story? AND the one that needed to be updated on every 7 minutes? Fucked. Up.

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  2. I also heard that the reason it is going to take so long to repair such a small break is because the line is so old. Apparently, back in the 60's they didn't bother to color code anything. So it's strictly trial and error.

    "Can you hear me now? No? How about now?"

    I went completely wireless back in October. Why would I want to pay for a phone that I could only use from one location? It just didn't make any sense any more.

    The only problem I have is when I have to be on hold forever with some tech support retard in India. Because it chews up my minutes like a rat in a Twinkie factory and sucks the life out of my battery. Things that were never an issue with the old hard wired phones.

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  4. This obviously was posted by someone who has no idea how cell phones work. You are only wireless from the cell tower,the rest of the way you are on copper or fiber. since I deal with copper/fiber cuts all day long I can testify that cell towers go down all the time.it may not affect you when you are driving because you will jump to the next cell tower soon enough, but if you are at home next to the dead tower your phone will die just like any other. we had a major increase in cuts lately, the worst is when the dickheads cut the fiber thinking it's copper and then just leave it since it's worthless to them.last year one of our guys managed to catch the fiber cutting sob and turn him over to cops.

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  5. Thanks for saying that Meesha! I don't work in telecom, but I do have a degree in related areas. It always cracks me up when somebody says the baby Bells should just pack it in.

    2 things people take for granted rely on the old t-com backbone of AT&T and others. Those 2 things are cell phones and the Internet.

    Shut off the copper/fiber backbone and your gear from Comcast and Sprin't aint Stop working. That is because instead of investing in their own backbone networks, they just attached to the existing ones. I can't blame them it was cheaper.

    Now I can see a day coming when that will NOT be the case, but except in limited cases it isn't here yet.

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