Re: Availabilty vs cost
"I dont know - round here they would be better off pulling fibre through rather than the two or three attempts at repairing the 'copper' every year. "
But if you abandon the copper, people are left without service. There are burglar alarms and private lines that need the copper pair and the Ofcom rule about 999 service during power cuts becomes problematic. You'd have to install new kit in everyone's house and then you run into issues with power sockets not being next to phone sockets. All of these need to be solved, I'm sure, but there's no direct path I can see to just dumping the copper network.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
