Only in first-world countries did everyone have a phone and the Earth’s population was half what it is now.
Comment on Geologists doubt Earth has the amount of copper needed to develop the entire world
52fighters@lemmy.sdf.org 10 months ago
I remember when phone lines were made of copper. We were sure that it would be impossible for everyone to have a phone.
shalafi@lemmy.world 10 months ago
r_deckard@lemmy.world 10 months ago
There’s a lot of copper pairs left underground. Many hundreds of thousands of kilometres of it. Use it as a pull-through for fibre-optic bundles, and everyone can have gigabit internet.
Seriously though, there’ll come a time when that underground obsolete copper will become economic to retrieve.
52fighters@lemmy.sdf.org 10 months ago
One of my family members had that job for a good while. What’s interesting is the phone companies did not keep great records of what’s copper and where it is, so a lot of it is likely to remain in place for a long time. Something else he has seen is thieves cutting fiber, thinking it is copper, and causing outages, although that is less frequent than it was years ago.
ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml 10 months ago
All kinds if copper are economic to achieve with enough crack