🚀 go-pugleaf

On Tue, 02 Nov 2010 11:05:37 +1100, Real Clear wrote:
 .........
> Once upon a time, when the world was simple and Telstra was a telephone
> company, the telephone system was entirely analog, and the whole system
> ran over copper.
> 
Actually, when "Telstra" came into being a hell of a lot of their
infrastructure was already digital.

> Then optical fibre was used to link exchanges, and this left Telstra
> with large bundles of redundant inter-exchange copper wire.
> 
Yep, a lot of digital inter-exchange trunks over copper were replaced with
digital trunks over fibre. Long before that time the individual analogue
circuits between exchanges were replaced with digital links multiplexing
many voice channels over a single copper pair, so there were already lots
of "redundant inter-exchange copper wire" which came in quite handy for
the various early data networks.

> Over the years, mainly through bad record-keeping, Telstra lost trace of
> how much it had in the ground, and in a 1997 memo, Frank Blount
> chastised his staff claiming that up to half of Telstra's $3 billion in
> copper assets were unrecorded and effectively 'lost' to the system.
> Through "concentrated efforts", he said, the company had been
> rediscovering this cable at a rate of about $200 million in value a
> year.
.........
Guess what, the "value" quoted for those assets was in the revenue that
they generate for Telstra in the services they carry, not the "value" in
the cost of the copper.

Anyone who tries to like the "value" Telstra quote in relation to the
value of the recovered scrap is just demonstrating ignorance - just like
the ridiculous claim about some sort of conspiracy in putting in the NBN
to somehow cash in on the copper currently in the ground.

As far as conduits go, the NBN needs access to put their (tiny) fibre
cables through, as it is currently done only when the conduit has
insufficient space for new cabling is the old stuff removed - because it
is far more cost-effective to just leave it there.

-- 
Regards, David.

David Clayton
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Knowledge is a measure of how many answers you have, intelligence is a
measure of how many questions you have.