From: William Herrin [mailto:bill@herrin.us] On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 10:18 AM, Robert E. Seastrom <rs@seastrom.com> wrote:
Jimmy Hess <mysidia@gmail.com> writes:
Seems like a waste for VZ not to reclaim it so it can be recycled/put to good use.
To put some numbers with this statement (which I agree with btw):
OSP cable is commonly available composed of 19 AWG, 22 AWG, 24 AWG, and 26 AWG pairs. 19 and 26 are outliers; 19 is for low pair count cables going extra long distances and 26 is only good for quite short distances (CO/SLC to customer) but Superior Essex makes a 3000 pair cable in #26 (22 and 24 max out at 900 and 1800 pair, at least on the spec sheet I have handy).
Most of the cable out there is 22 or 24. Solid #22 and #24 (uninsulated) copper wire weighs 1.95 and 1.23 pounds per 1000 feet respectively. That's without the insulation, and only one wire, not a pair.
I found scrap pricing for "telco" (obviously the contaminant ratios out there are different for different types of copper) at $1.20/pound, which may or may not be current, but if you figure a single pair of #24 is probably around 4 pounds per 1000 feet scrap weight... if an average loop is, say, 5000 feet, you can see where there is substantial incentive to recycle all the 600 pair that you have lying around.
Hi Robert,
That depends on the cost of recovering it. We're not talking about salvage operators pulling cable, we're talking about highly trained [sic] Verizon installers.
The last 4 pairs in use on that 3000 count cable will tend to linger a long, long time before you can go remove it. Mostly you'll recover short runs of low-count cable like the fifty-foot two and six pair cables from the street to the house: maybe $3 in scrap. How many dollars worth of time will the installer bill Verizon for recovering it?
If it means they're shutting down the CLECs in the process? I suspect it's worth quite a bit of installer billable time... Jamie