(Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)
A talk about threats to cable operators’ networks at a telecom-industry conference in Washington last week did not feature the usual suspects.
Instead of the Salt Typhoon hackers allegedly affiliated with China’s security ministry that remain burrowed into telecom networks, this panel at the SCTE TechExpo 25 conference spotlighted a lower-tech threat: people vandalizing cable infrastructure to steal and resell the copper inside.
“It's frustrating across the board,” said Jane Rhodes, SVP for corporate physical security at Charter Communications.
“This isn't an infrequent occurrence,” said Mike Spaulding, Comcast’s VP for network maintenance. “This is something that's literally happening daily across the nation, depending on where you're at.”
Panelists said restoring service can be relatively quick or take more than eight hours, depending on whether the cut wire is on a pole or in the ground. Either way, subscribers blame the cable operator, Spaulding said: “We are the ones kind of left holding the reliability bag.”
A 21-page report prepared for the cable-industry group NCTA cited “more than 5,770 intentional incidents of theft and vandalism between June to December 2024,” some of which targeted “fiber-optic transmission lines and wireless communications towers that have no copper.”
Some of these incidents involve motives beyond greed; FBI agent Robert Cochrane said on the panel that the bureau has judged some “criminally or politically motivated to attempt to damage our ability to communicate."
But for the most part, it’s just people looking to make a quick, illegal buck. Metal recycler sites list prices of $3 and up for copper, depending on its condition. “Where copper is present, there is a desire by the bad actors to seek that out, take it, harvest it and take it back to recyclers,” said Rhodes.
This is not just a US problem, nor is it confined to telecom infrastructure: Bell Canada has reported similar cases of theft, while two weeks ago the UK EV-charging firm InstaVolt announced a tech-heavy strategy to detect and deter thefts of charging cables.
In an interview after the SCTE panel, Mark Bridges, EVP and CTO of the industry-standards group CableLabs, said only the last mile or a fraction of a mile of a cable company’s network is likely to include copper. “About 94% of a typical operator's network is going to be fiber,” he said, which leaves those final stretches going from neighborhood-level nodes to individual buildings, plus some intermediary facilities.
‘No Scrap Value!’
Sitting alongside Bridges, CableLabs President and CEO Phil McKinney said the problem of vandalism of copper lines (still used for legacy phone service in the US) had grown so endemic in “certain developing countries” that “they just switched to fiber.”
In addition to being faster and scalable, fiber doesn’t hide metals worth extracting and reselling. But some thieves haven’t grasped that difference, which led one Pacific Northwest utility to put “no scrap value!” signs on poles holding up fiber cables.
On the panel, Rhodes said Charter has tried to educate people about how most of its infrastructure has nothing worth stealing. “We actually do outreach to different homeless encampments and walk them through,” she said.
Replied moderator Mike O’Reilly, who served as an FCC commissioner in the first Trump administration: “Do they believe you?” Her answer: “Sometimes.”
Rhodes also noted that while copper thieves have to work to liberate that metal from a cable– “they have to burn it, they have to strip it”–market prices for copper at recyclers have also gone up.
Nobody on the panel mentioned the Trump administration’s late-July move to slap a 50% tariff on “all imports of semi-finished copper products and intensive copper derivative products.”
The speakers sounded slightly more optimistic about educating recyclers to recognize and refuse problematic copper than lobbying legislators to enact laws requiring more accountability of scrap-metal transactions.
Today, many of those sales happen with little or no record-keeping. “There's virtually no traceability,” said Spaulding, unintentionally echoing a common complaint of labor and environmental advocates seeking to end the opaque trade of dangerously mined “conflict minerals” in developing countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Rhodes said Charter has sent reps to recyclers to teach people there not to accept burnt copper, adding “We've visited some really lovely scrapyards.”
Panelist Alex Minard, NCTA’s vice president and lead legislative counsel, said 24 states are considering legislation to address this problem.
In California, which Rhodes called “our number-one spot for these incidents,” the state assembly passed a bill, AB 476, against opposition from metals dealers that awaits a signature or a veto from Gov. Gavin Newsom (D).
The SCTE speakers sounded least optimistic about law enforcement solving a problem that ranks below violent crime in police priorities. Said Spaulding: “We're not going to be able to arrest our way out of this problem.”
But O’Reilly gave the last word to the FBI’s Cochrane, asking him if he had any words for his fellow speakers if they needed the bureau’s help tomorrow. “The FBI is always available if you need us tomorrow,” he replied.