[indigochill]

To [0], would there be any value to stealing the cards not to sell them but to reverse engineer them to find vectors for attacks? "Effectively unsupported, never updated, and responsible for a massive amount of telecommunications" sounds like a great time for an attacker. Also seems like it would have value for industrial espionage.

[mdip]

I can't say that I'm completely sure, but I'm going to guess the answer is "Probably Not". The big telecoms tend to be very conservative about where they spend their money -- understandable with a product this expensive despite the grief one tends to have in working with the product. The market is also moving toward more generic equipment and less specialized hardware for a lot of things and I'd imagine these cards will fall into that category at some point, as well.