Ask Slashdot: What Is the Future of Old Copper Pair Technology?

Posted by timothy on Sunday June 2, 2013 @06:53AM from the and-we-liked-it dept.

p00kiethebear writes "My father works for a large corporation that licenses ISDN lines (among a plethora of other services) including T1 and T3 technology. Surprisingly there are still large companies that use fifty year old T1 technology to handle their voice and data use. My father's 30 year career has been almost exclusively in helpdesk / troubleshooting T1 / ISDN technology and both he and I are worried about the future. Cable modems and DSL have replaced ISDN in most cases and it's now an archaic solution reserved for voice actors, tech support-terminal workers, large companies that need voice and video conferencing, and data and private users too far from the loop for DSL or Cable. My dad is still 15 years from retirement. Is twisted copper going the way of the dodo or is it here to stay for the foreseeable future?"

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DSL over copper by raburton · 2013-06-02 06:58 · Score: 5, Insightful

The question seems to use copper wire and ISDN interchangeably. In the UK the DSL you mention runs over those copper wires, so they aren't going anywhere.
Copper's got some HUGE advantages over fiber by The+Cisco+Kid · 2013-06-02 07:14 · Score: 5, Insightful

1. Its already there, pretty much everywhere.
2. Only one end needs to have power for it to work. (This is the "911 works even when the power is out" issue)
3. You don't need multi-thousand dollar tools to splice it or terminate it.
4. You don't need multi-hundred dollar equipment to connect to it.