Thieves target BT cables as scrap value rises Thieves in Sussex made off with more than half a mile of BT cabling in an overnight operation that cut off 800 homes and businesses. The line was ripped out at between 1am and 2am on Wednesday morning from a rural road near Lewes. Workers discovered the theft at 4am. The recent recovery in the price of copper has once again …
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Simply set up a foreign exchange bureau specialising in buying US coinage and smelting it for the metal content. Only don't do it in the US because it became illegal as soon as the metal value exceeded the face value on the coins.
anon, since even though I don't think there's anything illegal in pointing this out, I don't think the Secret Service (whose job it is to protect US currency) would approve.
the main trunk cable from London to Manchester from copper to fibre optic they made a profit on the deal. That's right, the scrap value of the old cable was more than the cost of the replacement.
You would have thought that they'd be keener to upgrade the whole network to optical for this reason. Not much scrap value in glass cables for thieves also (though some are still stupid enough to steal it).
Require all scrap dealers to get ID from anyone selling them scrap. Insure that the police visit them randomly to verify that they're doing this.
Amazing how someone will discover, when asked for a driver's license, that they've just decided they will hold on to the large pile of dirt-covered telecom cable in the back of their truck.
Seriously, how hard is it to catch these bozos? I would suspect that scrap metal dealers usually know a good portion of their clientele, and that a new face flogging dirt-covered cable might raise a few eyebrows.
//mine's the one with the mud stains on it
1: The pikeys get cheap source of Copper to flog to the local dodgy scrappy, which then flogs it off to china...
2: The coppers get something else to do at 3am(other than chase chav boyracers across the countryside), like wonder why the local police station has lost connection to the regional HQ.
3: BT gets a good reason to upgrade the lines with Fibre and also saves themselvesthe cost of removing the original cables (all now at the cost of thier insurance premiums)
4: The Insurance Co's get good reason to jack everyones insurance rates up nationwide and lay on a surcharge for profit margin.
5: All the BT/teleco customers get faster broadband.....
....oh but all the BT customers get shafted for the increased profit margin of BT/telecos on the excuse that they have to pay for all the extra work/parts to fix the damage done by the cheeky chappies running about with 7.5Tonne flatbed trucks at 2-5am.
(btw, anyone want a new patio/driveway laid, we can do it real cheap, will beat all local competition, lots of experience, we also have a special offer of 5 Ton of copper available for £££, can deliver overnight only)
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> It's a UK story, why are we being quoted copper prices in dollars?
And in weights in quaint olde imperial pounds instead of metrics? Sloppy work indeed Reg!
No harm done though, lets see if we cant fix this up.. $3 per pound... that works out to about...
4 Euros per Kilogram.
There you go AH, you can stop clutching your chest and relax, how 'bout you put the kettle on, and make us all a cuppa...
Paris: she doesnt know much about stealing copper, but she *has* been caught on camera taking wood...
I they can organise nicking that lot, they will be able to burn off the insulation and shift it in smaller, bagged lots.... I would imagine.
Up here there was a spate of thefts of signalling cable from beside rural railways a while back, not too clever when you have 20 coal wagons rumbling down a single rack stretch
Here in Atlanta, the copper thieves have been pulling the wiring out of the boxes that power/control the traffic cameras along the interstates. And yes, we've also had thieves pull wiring and A/C tubing out of houses that were still under construction. And, saving the best for last, one pair that tried to pull the multi-kV lines... needless to say that one of them got electrocuted.
@Richard Scratcher
BT certainly had breakage alarms along larger cables when they went when I worked for a contractor for them in the seventies. This is probably why the thieves struck in the early hours of the morning - as it takes longer for someone from a regional response centre to get to the crime scene than local staff.
@Simon10
Simon10
The urban cables or those beside large roads are in ducts. Many rural cables alongside quiet roads were (in the seventies and probably still are) simply buried beside the road using a trenching tool. Not so strong against this kind of attack as a ducted cable but a much cheaper solution.
because some pikey's had nabbed the overhead lines and other power related cabling.
unfortunatly while we stood waiting for a train that would never arrive, we didn't have the pleasure of looking at a charred corpse hanging from the wires with fake dole claims paperwork still smoldering in its pockets.
brave/stupid. either or. only one outcome would have been acceptable from that activity for the populous as a whole. see above.
I can answer that. The resale value of fibre is reduced to zero as soon as you attach a Toyota pickup to one end and rip it out if the ground by brute force.
Some enterprising Nigerians found this one out the hard way when they tried to ransom a "highly valuable" cable back to the local arm of a western company after they'd nicked it. They's been operating this scam for years and were rather upset to find that their chosen occupation was being made redundant by the advance of technology.
Gave me a good laugh when I heard this one firsthand.
Lots of networking experts on here, with excellent solutions. As usual.
Yes, I suppose BT could have replaced the stolen copper with fibre (note the UK English spelling) but it would have presented a few challenges. Firstly it is, so I'm led to believe, quite hard to joint a fibre to the five hundred pair copper cable that would have been jointed to the stolen cable. It's also a fairly hard job to then take that fibre and connect it to the phone sockets in homes and businesses without replacing the entire distribution network and issuing every customer with new kit.
Now, if I was managing the incident - my preference would be to get customers back in service as quickly as possible - but now I see the error of my ways. It would be much better to leave them out of service for weeks while the entire local network is replaced and new optic terminating kit is ordered, delivered and installed for every building served by the stolen cable. That just leaves the tricky problem of jointing the fibre to the existing copper cable - probably a roll of insulating tape or something would help with that.
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