BT's Old Copper Landline Network Could Be Worth Over $2 Billion (engadget.com) 59
BT could make more than $2.7 billion by recycling copper from its aging UK landline network as BT subsidiary Openreach replaces legacy wiring with full-fiber broadband. Engadget reports: BT's recovered copper was previously valued at around $2 billion. But prices have surged, thanks to rising global demand tied to AI data centers, renewable energy and electrification. With global demand expected to grow sharply over the next decade, the value of BT's copper could potentially exceed even that $2.7 billion estimate.
The BT subsidiary Openreach is in the process of replacing its legacy copper network with full-fiber broadband, with plans to connect 30 million residences by the end of the decade. It's already recovered nearly 10,000 metric tons of copper in its latest financial year and over 22,000 metric tons since 2023. "Copper has become one of the most strategic materials in the modern economy," according to Openreach's head of sustainability, Abby Chicken.
Unsurprisingly, BT isn't waiting to profit from the recovered metal. It has an agreement with EMR, a cable recycling company, and recently received $133 million up front for recovered copper.
The BT subsidiary Openreach is in the process of replacing its legacy copper network with full-fiber broadband, with plans to connect 30 million residences by the end of the decade. It's already recovered nearly 10,000 metric tons of copper in its latest financial year and over 22,000 metric tons since 2023. "Copper has become one of the most strategic materials in the modern economy," according to Openreach's head of sustainability, Abby Chicken.
Unsurprisingly, BT isn't waiting to profit from the recovered metal. It has an agreement with EMR, a cable recycling company, and recently received $133 million up front for recovered copper.
Meanwhile AT&T just doesnt care (Score:2)
-- because we are the phone company.
They just over-lash the existing copper when overbuilding with fiber here in So. Cal and therefore make it harder to recover in the future.
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Maybe the copper line makes a good anchor to attach the fiber line too ;)
Unlikely (Score:1)
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In the UK most copper lines are either in underground conduits, from which they can be pulled easily, or overhead from the last pole to the property.
Of course I live in one of the few estates where the lines were buried, because no poles were permitted, which means that I'm stuck with FTTC and then copper.
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> because no poles were permitted, which means that I'm stuck with FTTC and then copper. ...agreed, but not for the reasons you think. You can't have fibre because Openreach are a bunch of twats. They've taken at least 30 years to get around to fibre-ing up neighbourhoods. They could have had (at least) FTTC 20 years ago, but chose not to. The regulator has been pretty persistent, and has threatened them with breakups from BT several times, every time they've cried off saying it would harm consumers, bla
Meanwhile, In America (Score:2)
Meanwhile, in America they abandon the copper in place.
It looks like a fortune to be made. But the recovery cost is probably much higher than we might guess.
Re: Meanwhile, In America (Score:4, Interesting)
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In the local neighborhoods most of the copper is below ground, that's not going to be cost effective if you have to dig. It's been down there since the 60s and started having frequent connection point issues around the 90s.
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Odd. The poles here are doing fine.
The phone lines are buried though, and nothing but trouble. The company's failure to fix the. Is why I got a cell phone, a,one with the price for the landline being higher than the cell contract, and the landline bill did Not include long distance. They really did not want my business and were driving off customers so they could officially abandon the land lines.
problem is finding out who owns it (Score:3)
And the earth contains $trillions$ in copper... (Score:3)
Re: And the earth contains $trillions$ in copper.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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The easy copper has been mined.
https://edconway.substack.com/p/the-race-for-copper-hots-up
https://www.mining.com/web/an-american-mine-still-has-millions-of-tons-of-copper-if-companies-can-get-to-it/
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from your walls? no.
from every rack in every rural exchange? sure, if it wasn't already done a decade ago.
from nearly every last mile? makes a lot of financial send. Easier done if you're already in there to pull new fibre or if the copper can be pulled with the duct and winch method. You could have a handful of crews working full-time and every day they work they'd recover more copper than it costs you to pay them.
Re: And the earth contains $trillions$ in copper.. (Score:2)
What about when fiber installation is run concurrently with copper retrieval?
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The actual tearing the jacket off is an automated process. Recyclers here will accept intact cable for the copper. As for stripping from the house, it depends how the house is built. If everything is in conduit then it's quite easy, you'll have the house stripped before lunchtime. If your wiring is fixed in place you may as well leave it. Bulk cable from phone companies is often run in conduit or on overhead wires. It may actually be quite cheap to recover.
Not so fast (Score:4, Interesting)
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Also not mentioned: what will happen to all the poles that no longer have wires strung on them. Openreach aren't replacing directly with fibre, that's being routed in the ground from new distribution boxes, except possibly for really rural areas. For suburbia that's millions of useless and worthless ex pine trees soaked in creosote that will not only be a bitch to dig out (some have been there for over 50 years) but also are unrecyclable as well as shockingly polluting should they be burnt.
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Digging out isn't hard, any heavy equipment that pulls straight up usually doesn't have an issue. If it does cut the pole off at ground level.
The poles can be retasked as fence posts on farmland.
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In Europe, most of power and phonelines are *below* ground. Unlike the US, which looks to me like a third world country.
Re:Not so fast (Score:5, Informative)
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In Europe, most of power and phonelines are *below* ground. Unlike the US, which looks to me like a third world country.
It depends on the area. If you live in a geologically stable area then burying lines is great. If you have frequent earthquakes, then it's foolish. There are a lot of flood prone areas in the US as well. Above ground is a lot easier to deal with in those areas as well.
NYC has all of it's power infrastructure underground. It was a nightmare after tropical storm Sandy flooded it.
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To be fair there are advantages to above ground lines. Japan got onto fibre very early because they opened up their above ground infrastructure so that other companies could use the poles for their own cables. It looks messy but they are a couple of decades ahead of the UK for internet access.
They are above ground around here. Had to get them to come and fix the neighbour's cable that was attached to a bracket on my house. The guy took a look at it and said it was too much hassle to get the cherry picker, b
Re:Not so fast (Score:4, Informative)
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The street lamp network is already in place, usually fairly close to a pole anyway and that would also require some work to dig a channel to hook up to the power with the costs entirely borne by the local council. Plus there's regulations on how close (or separate) lamps are, so that isn't going to happen.
> We don't have much else on those poles
We don't have _anything_ else on those poles. Legally you can't even put a picture of a lost cat on one without permission from Openreach, but that tends to have
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We don't have _anything_ else on those poles. Legally you can't even put a picture of a lost cat on one without permission from Openreach
I did not know that, Thanks, I have sometimes seen small grey boxes on the pole but I guess they are also part of the phone system then. I guess they really don't have much use then once the phone lines are gone, It would be quite nice to get rid of all the overhead lines going to the houses, I certainly don't use mine anymore, In fact I have a lot of phone line and tv coax running around the building that could all go too.
The street lamp network is already in place
I was thinking more decorative, But I guess it's just extra cash that could be used
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Those boxes are the distribution boxes on the "final pole" (from a cable that _has_ been run underground or a couple of wires from a preceding pole that extends) to split to individual residential properties and can have up to 16 wires off them. Depends how it was built out when the houses were built; mine has 2 connecting wires and 10 distribution ones as well as 2 more to the next pole as my road was extended with more properties after the initial installation.
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They are putting fibre on the poles now. Not just BT, around here we have Cityfibre using the poles for their connections.
Re: Not so fast (Score:2)
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Line truck. Pole puller. Job done. [youtube.com]
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Assumes poles are embedded in soil. Apart from rural areas, they are embedded in the asphalt of the pavement (sidewalk), requiring infill, tamping, patching, etc.. Times several million.
For added fun, Openreach will claim it's the local council's responsibility to maintain the streets when a pole is removed and local councils will claim it's Openreach's responsibility to make good the mess that results. Either way the argument would take years to resolve involviing courts of all flavours while the street re
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Telephone poles in UK are only ever for use by BT (previously GPO) as they put them up and have never shared with anybody. Mainly because there wasn't anybody to share with; even when alternative landline networks came into being they still routed through the BT national network as they were small localised ones (such as Kingston Telecommunications) before the advent of cellular networks.
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Not to mention asbestos etc. (Score:2)
Asbestos siding works fine unless it's made friable by demolition. Ditto abundant asbestos plumbing etc insulation in old structures.
The world has plenty of other sources of scrap copper.
Lead in ancient cables Re:Not so fast (Score:5, Interesting)
I think AT&T (pre-1984) and the "Baby Bells" (1984 on) stopped putting lead shielding around copper cables in the 1970s or the early 1980s.
Legacy Lead-Sheathed Telecommunications Cables: Status and Issues for Congress [congress.gov] is a report from 2023 that says
AT&T estimated that lead-sheathed cables represent less than 10% of its copper cable footprint of roughly 2 million miles. Verizon also reported that lead-sheathed cables make up a small percentage of its copper network
The report is light on details though. It's also not clear what part of the modern AT&T overlaps with the pre-1984-breakup version of AT&T.
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Only the earliest of cables were lead sheathed, the bulk of it is standard copper / PVC. And even lead sheathed cables are handled by some recyclers (you don't get as much for it).
Business case (Score:2)
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Because there's no return on the copper you are digging up tens of thousands of miles of cable for?
Do you have any information showing what the ROI would be on recovering all this unused cable, negative or positive? Neither does anyone else. So stop assuming.
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Re: Business case (Score:2)
I thought they were using conduits? So no digging, just pull out copper and pull through fiber.
Just have us bring it in (Score:3)
Do it like soda bottle deposit returns.
The end users just rip out their old unused wires and bring it into the local office for a few bucks.
Saves the phone company from hiring crews, equipment, and fuel.
Plus, if the homeowner breaks their own fiber, then the phone company gets some money for a service call.
And if they bring in their AC wiring, that'll be even more copper.
Tbf a lot is actually aluminium (Score:4, Interesting)
BT (Score:2)
Yeah, all you need is 200 years for them to book enough appointments to actually pull the stuff down, and you're golden! (or at least, copper-coloured).
Copper (Score:2)
As someone who just had FTTP (yep, to the premises) installed in their rural home, the way they did it was thus:
- They went to the local cabinet (which is already fibre-backed to the local exchange many km's away), strung a fibre out of it.
- They got up the telegraph pole in my streets, strung a new fibre off it.
- They used the old copper line that's been there since the 60's to slide the new fibre reel down.
- They put a second hook on my eaves, and hooked the fibre from there, and then wired the fibre dire
Internet - Single point of societal failure (Score:3)
Our modern lives are entirely dependent on Internet infrastructure.
No internet, we have no comms, no payment systems, no cash machines, no shopping. It would be a month of Sundays in the 1950's.
Want to kill Britain? Take out the London Internet Exchange (LINX), no easy task, but not impossible in the age of drones, supersonic missiles, bunker busters, AI augmented penetration and corruption. And if you cant take out the nodes, take out the power supplies.
Copper Analogue got us through WW2 and can be fixed with screwdrivers and pliers.
Why rip it out for a quick buck? Might need it one day. It's immune to EMP. Later on we might find another use for it. It's not it's not about the metal, its the value of the labour putting a network in that large and complex.
Re: Internet - Single point of societal failure (Score:2)
In what way are long copper wires immune to EMP?
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It's probably more that the old pre integrated circuit and transistorized phone network would have probably better survived an EMP. Since you were basically talking about a bunch of mechanical switches and relays.
All of those relays also contain long copper wires. Are you familiar with the operation of an ignition coil? In an EMP, the magnetic field collapsing induces a current in all of them which are oriented in the correct direction.
A fiber network with all of the electronics in grounded, shielded cases should be much more resistant to EMP than the traditional POTS network.
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" No internet, we have no comms, no payment systems, no cash machines, no shopping. It would be a month of Sundays in the 1950's. "
Kind of.
We managed just fine back in the 80's without the internet being forced into every part of our lives.
Was it AS convenient ? No. Of course not.
But it did work. :P
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I hear you. We have merchants here who no longer accept cash. It's nuts.
Couple of days not being able to shop sugar in Tescos and the lard arses round my way will start getting very hangry. I expect they'll start eating the diabetics when they go hypo and pass out.
Alfred Henry Lewis: The American journalist in 1896, wrote "the only barrier between us and anarchy is the last nine meals we've had".
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Apart from being easy to produce I've wondered what the cultural fascination is with Zombie movies.
Then I saw this.
Supermarket shoppers fight over loo roll and panic buy booze in UK coronavirus lockdown chaos [thesun.co.uk]
They are training movies.
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"It's immune to EMP."
Not quite. Well yes, obviously the COPPER doesn't give a shit about emp but as I understand, emp induces current in wires/circuits, generating voltage that fries things. Anything connected to those wires will absolutely fry to EMP unless hardened.
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As would all the endpoints of a fibre network.
That'll buy alot of meth! (Score:1)
Fortunately there's now a $500 luxury toothbrush to use so you don't get methmouth.
Double yay!
Out of curiousity (Score:2)
I wonder what the profits are once you subtract the costs of extracting those copper lines
from the medium they are currently attached to.
Be that overhead cabling or buried cable.
The latter being a much bigger pain in the ass to remove than the former.