I'm curious. How difficult is it to get dedicated wireline for repeater linking these days and how reliable are they? I say that because I routinely see telco tombstones that have been damaged, knocked over, covers off, wires hanging out, etc., and left unrepaired for months. It's as if the telco realizes that nobody is using wired telephones, so why bother maintaining the plant.
AT&T wireline announced that they'd stop selling conditioned copper circuits in my area back a few years ago. I still have several in use. I wouldn't try ordering a new one now.
The techs that really knew how to build out and maintain those circuits are gone (I hired a few of them). Now, you get a guy that understands two wires go from here to there, but that's about it. I doubt any of them could properly set up a circuit now.
If you watch the FCC notifications, you'll see a lot of notices about the big carriers abandoning their copper plants in parts of the country. Here's one that came through today:
DOC-384207A1.pdf
Copper cable plant has been abandoned in some areas, and all service is now on fiber. The copper plant is still in place, but no longer maintained in some areas. Again, the outside plant guys are gone, retired, moved on, died off. The newer techs don't have the skills to run the large plants like that any more. Carriers found it easier to migrate it all to fiber and just break out to copper for the "last mile". Easier for the techs, cheaper to maintain.
It's too bad, the old Bell System copper plant was a beautiful thing, verging on an engineering wonder of the world. No so much any more. I did hire an AT&T guy about 15 years ago as a field tech. He moved up to OSP Engineer, then took one of the younger techs under his wing and taught her everything he knew. She keeps our stuff running, still builds out a mean copper plant where I need it, but mostly engineers fiber systems now.
All my new stuff will be on my own IP network, a mix of fiber and point to point microwave. I've pretty much lost my confidence with AT&T wireline. They are no longer who they once were. Only thing left now is for all those big copper cables to start falling off the poles. There is good money (or, at least was) in pulling old cable and recycling it.
None the less, copper pairs did this for decades, and it did it well. "Back in the day", AT&T ran an excellent system and getting a circuit across country wasn't a problem. Heck, at one point I had a couple of dedicated AT&T ISDN/BRI circuits running from California out to Hawaii for some special usage.