[someperson]

Potentially apocryphal, but Telstra's copper cable network supposedly had its insulation made of paper, not rubber. I remember when it rained the curbside pits fill with water, causing slowdowns and frequent ADSL dropouts (until things dried out).

[kabdib]

It took over a year for Ziply to repair the land line of my 90-year-old parents. 30+ hours on the phone with support, multiple visits by techs who were simply not interested in doing any work. I had a tech tell me, literally to my face, "this line is working fine" when the line was stone dead. Another told me that I had to buy all new phones because the ones my parents had were "out of date". (To humor him, I bought a $15 phone from a local electronics store, plugged it in and showed the tech that it wasn't working. He did nothing).

I have now learned that the WA state utilities commission is pretty interested when providers try to pull stunts like this. You can also dig out useful company contact information from the commission's website.

[rootusrootus]

> I have now learned that the WA state utilities commission is pretty interested when providers try to pull stunts like this.

A number of years ago I worked at a CLEC, during that short window of time when they could exist. One of the more useful things I learned is how much power the PUC has. Every phone company has a team that deals with complaints coming in via the PUC and they are eager to resolve them. Not something I'd necessarily use in lieu of regular old customer service for most issues, but when the first and second attempts fail, calling the PUC will work 100% of the time.

[kabdib]

There are public records on how phone companies are doing, complaint-wise. It's interesting (but infuriating) reading.

[tenebrisalietum]

I think this is common in places where they don't expect moisture to reach, but then things change and it gets there anyway.

If your POTS lines are down and the telecom company is telling you a "wet pulp repair" is underway, your phones are going to be down for a while because a bunch of paper-insulated cables need to be manually rewired because they got wet and corroded.

I found this interesting: http://etler.com/docs/bsp-archive/629/629-295-300_I3.pdf - guess it's standard practice to dry out the lines, wrap in cloth, put dessicant and then seal it.

[jcims]

I know there are some telecom folks on here that may be provoked to correct me but pulp was standard before the advent of cheap plastic insulation in the 1950s on up. I live in the midwest and my brother is a lineman for AT&T. There is an astonishing amount of pulp-insulated phone line still in service today.

In order to keep it dry, the conduit that the pulp lines are run through is pressurized to 5-10psi. Anyone that has worked with air compressors knows that pumping ambient pressurized air down into underground pipes is a recipe for condensation, so high capacity air driers are required to remove the water before it goes underground.

Any kind of outage on the compressor or dryer is effectively an emergency because water infiltration can happen almost immediately, creating an outage and extremely expensive repair.

[ComputerGuru]

> I know there are some telecom folks on here that may be provoked to correct me

Aka Cunningham’s law

> Any kind of outage on the compressor or dryer

I’m confused: isn’t a bigger concern any physical damage to the conduit anywhere in the run that is too large for the compressor to overcome? Or are we talking football-field-sized compressors here?

[BoorishBears]

http://www.airtalk.com/z_ref-4_1.html

[Johnythree]

The gas flow on each line was monitored with flow gauges, so any increase could be attended to before it became a problem.

[stefan_]

The more you learn about this ancient cable technology the more absurd it becomes. We shower these fuckers with money but they would rather keep their paper insulated phone lines with permanent compressors and dryer running than braindead simple fiber. No wonder it is permanently broken and they can't keep a single 9 of reliability.

[oasisbob]

Fiber may be simple, but the way we use it is not. Unlike copper, a GPON fiber install is going to have active electronics and splice trays for every several dozen subscribers.

Plenty of opportunities for water ingress to still cause problems.

[kazen44]

Also, sending a singal across fiber is definitely not easy.

ADSL is basically modulating a radio wave over a cable directly to another device. Fiber requires high quality optics, high quality lasers, tons of active hardware if you want to do it at scale. (not to mention the mind boggling physics and manufacturing required for things like DWDM, optical path switching etc).

Fiber optics have existed since the 80's yes, but prices of high quality fiber solutions have only dropped massively in the last decade or so.

[stefan_]

Exactly. That all sounds infinitely easier than buried air pipes. Mind boggling physics are what gives us CPUs, but the final product is reliable bar none.

[NavinF]

Meh. Fiber has been cheaper than copper per mile for a long time and 10km optics are like $20.

[namibj]

Don't go for GPON, if you have a chance. Direct cabinet-to-apartment single-mode fiber (can be a pair that gets BiDi optics if one of the fibers fails, though only worth it if correlated failures aren't the bulk of issues) is future-proof. Also GPON tends to not get anywhere near the awesome pings 1G-LR and 10G-LR provide in sub-lightpseed regional situations.

[Johnythree]

It depends on the country, but originally our Telephone Companies were motivated by Quality of Service. However all that changed when the companies were privatised and profits became their only concern.

Historically there was a continuous upgrade of equipment as the technology improved. Manual exchanges became automatic, step-by-step gave way to cross-bar which gave way to electronic exchanges. Analog phones were replaced with digital and ADSL. And had that steady improvement continued, ADSL would have routinely been replaced with Optical fiber.

What stopped the perpetual upgrades was the arrival Thatcher/Regan/Howard and the advent of Neoliberalism. Which meant that anything which provided a Public Service (gasp Socialism!) was completely abandoned. We are only now starting to realise the long term cost of their vandalism.

[jcims]

I would bet this is a capex/opex thing.

[djweis]

There is still a lot of it in service. Sometimes you'll see a tank of nitrogen chained to a pole. It is there to put pressure through the cable to keep water out of a cut/nick on the lead sheath. The lines are pressurized normally from the central office and if the monitoring shows a drop in pressure (a cut in the sheath), they roll out cable maintenance.

[xattt]

Many parts of rural Prince Edward Island (PEI) has DSL running on a phone system that’s probably original from modernization initiatives in the 1960s - 1980s. Party lines were the norm in some areas up west until late-1980s.

[spookthesunset]

Back when a whole family had the same number and you had to ask whoever answered that you want to talk to so and so. Now days everybody has their own number and with caller id you (sometimes) know who is calling.

My daughter is gonna grow up not knowing any of the “shared phone line” etiquette because it is largely obsolete.

[xattt]

The party lines I’m talking about are shared loops between a group of residents in a rural area.

Some of the first-hand accounts I’ve read talked about neighbours listening in on conversations. People could tell a snooper was on the line because the volume of the other caller would drop. There was a social aspect to the whole enterprise because you could tell the one nosy neighbour to get off the line and the volume would magically raise.

(1) http://www.islandregister.com/phones/partyline.html

[Eelongate]

Front door etiquette still works basically the same way. A doorbell rings and the whole house hears it. Once person goes to answer it, then passes off the conversation to whoever it's actually for.

[kube-system]

A party line is not when "a" whole family shares a line, it's when several separate houses share a line.

[Finkregh]

You spelled Germany wrong... X_x

[Johnythree]

This not strictly true: The original pairs were paper insulated, but they were enclosed in a lead sheath which prevented water entry. Plus the cable was pressurised with dry nitrogen to keep out any water. Plus the flow of Nitrogen was monitored so that any pinholes could be detected before they caused a problem. Of course when Telecom was privatised all these quality control issues went out the window.

But there's a further point, the problem with moisture in the lines is the corrosion caused by electrolysis, which in turn is caused by the 50V DC on the lines. So even with modern plastic insulation, the copper would be corroded away by any electrolysis.

One last point: Rubber was almost never used as an insulator on phone lines.