[sharpy]

Once upon a time, a colleague from South Africa told me that they use fiber cable everywhere. I was surprised by this that they seem to be more advanced than us. Turns out that copper wire gets stolen, so they have no choice...

[vorpalhex]

There's an old network admin adage that if you ever need a backhoe to show up, all you need to do is bury some fiber optic cable.

Soon enough a backhoe will magically appear to sever your buried fiber.

This trick works great if you ever get lost. They say a master network admin always carries 6ft of fiber optic just for this reason.

[itronitron]

In my experience, you can easily find any buried telecom cable as long as you dig several feet away from the marked utility lines.

[esseph]

"Backhoe fade"

[gs17]

Looks like the same is happening here:

> The next step the agency is considering is using fiberglass composite instead of aluminum to construct guard rails “to remove the value to the thieves.”

[petsfed]

Near my home in the pacific northwest region of the US, I saw at a construction site a big spool (~1m diameter, 1+ meter tall) of cable with "Fiber, NOT copper" spray painted on its side. I cannot imagine how frustrating it would be to have a project like that delayed because some junkies stole a few hundred pounds of fiber optic cable, just to discard it when they realized that it wasn't something they could easily fence.

[userbinator]

They also have far more mobile phones than landlines, because it's easier and cheaper to put up a few towers than run wires to every building.

http://geographylists.com/list21n.html

[bregma]

Plenty of stories about yahoos hitching their pickup to a telephone repeater box around where I live to pull the copper cable only to find it's fibre. You can't beat stupid.