News

Thieves seek copper, get fibre

by Guy J Kewney | posted on 16 June 2008

One of the great 1980s jokes was "The AT&T Copper Mine" enterprise, where you raised enough money to buy AT&T purely so you could launch satellites to carry the voice traffic - and sell all the copper on the metals market. That story has become true in 2000s Britain, only it's British Rail which is losing its copper.

Recently, the sale of copper to China has become so profitable, that thefts of Tailrack copper have reached something like five times the rate they were at two years ago. And BT is losing cable too.

But what is worse: the thieves are not smart enough to know the difference between (valuable) copper and (expensive, but valueless) fibre cable. And comms links, say our sources, are going down because they're pinching the wrong stuff...