Don't expect fiber upgrades as telcos transition to IP-based networks


It’s about avoiding the mess.

There’s no cosmic plan to replace copper telephone wires with glass. That’s the clear message coming out of a panel discussion at the Comptel trade show in Las Vegas this week. In an article for Fierce Telecom, Sean Buckley reports that executives from AT&T, CenturyLink and Frontier agreed that there are no plans in the works for wide scale replacement of copper with fiber, but they will look at ending support for plain old telephone networks on a case-by-case basis…

‘Today, we have retired some copper, but where we have done it is very, very rare,’ said Bill Cheek, president of Wholesale Markets Group for CenturyLink.

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