Are BT admitting they used Alu now?? 10-15 years ago they were still adamant they had never used the stuff, and any you came across must have been fitted by a contractor without their knowledge.

Are BT admitting they used Alu now?? 

 

I could be wrong but as far as I'm aware BT will admit that it has been used in areas (without saying who by, and without confirming the areas affected), but will defend to the hilt the 'quality' of said lines - it works fine for voice calls, and that's all it has to do.

 

This was my understanding as of 6 years ago anyway before I left TalkTalk. The situation may have changed again since then.

BT did used to deny having any Aluminium "left" in their network while I worked there as a engineer from 2001-2008 but would admit that due to a shortage / high cost of copper in the 70's / 80's they used Aluminium but that they could not of envisaged problems this would have in future with ADSL etc as the company wanted to move to "cable" for higher bandwidth. The cable idea however was blocked by Ofcom as being uncompetitive as they said to let BT into he cable markets would destroy the other companies and that there would be no competition. BT were looking to make the move to fibre over ten years ago (actually sold their telephone exchanges to a German company and leased them back as once the fibre was in they would of been able to close most exchanges) and then the share price crashed from around £24 to just over £1 and if that price had fallen to <£1 the shareholders had voted to sell to AOL in about 2002 if I remember, but because of that and the stupid amount of money they paid for the 3G licence there was no way they could afford to invest in the network with Ofcom opening up the BT network to other companies and allowing it to be picked apart in the name of competition. This was a poor tactic by Ofcom as it crippled the only company investing in the UK network, they should of subsidised the other companies till they could compete or re nationalised BT Wholesale who "owned" the network. The only reason we are getting fibre now is because the government is footing the bill and probably costing billions to the tax payer they would never of had to pay.

In the areas I've worked in (all over the north of England and south of Scotland), upto 2008 anyway, there was still plenty of aluminium cable around, mainly outside of densely populated areas as nobody cares if only 1 or 2% of the population have crap lines, except for that 1 or 2%.

Oh dear, didn't realize it was in Runcorn too.  I'd heard it was rife around Milton Keynes.

 

We have the same problem down here too; our work estate dates to the 70s and the BB speeds are pathetic. Line has dropped overnight, every night, without fail since we moved in three years ago, to the point that the PSU for the router is plugged into a timer to switch off for 15 minutes at 1am every day :(

 

Openreach came out an said that of the four lines coming out of the cabinet down to our end, only one was copper, the others were aluminium.

From memory, BT replaced flown copper cables (Street telegraph pole to house) with poor quality aluminium on the North-West London housing estate I was living on in thd 1970s. This was done when BT was the GPO i.e. Pre -1974 and was done to every local  bousehold with a residential phone as part of a GPO programme. I don't know why it was done, but maybe the thinking was that it would reduce maintenance costs - sagg and breakage if flown copper lines was a probkem at that time. Presumably, the copper was melted down and then sold on the open market to right a GPO deficit - which, of course, in those days would have been part of HMG's public sector borrowing requirement. Economic circumstances and public finances were even more fragile than today and value analysis was the new management panacea in those days, so that rather like the BBC who erased vast quantities of video tape, so that the raw material could be re-processed, GPO would have considered all this type of stuff. Whose to say whether GPO didn't get a swop deal with one of the big cabke providers to turn residential copper into data cable for the then emerging business telecomm market.

 

All i can say is that reolacing the copper with aluminium resulted in a degraded connection and audio and the alu cables quickly oxidised on the outside and crystallised on thd inside, meaning they broke more often in strong winds and winter.

 

Amusingly, I was told that the engineers that did the job "Sold" the change to the local housewives on the basis that the aluminium cable wouldn't stretch as much as the copper (Esoecially in summer) and therefore wouldn't break as frequently. 

 

In retrosoect it was just another "Frying oans into Spitfires" exercise.

 

Postscript

 

I was forgetting that, on the direction of HMG, a public corporation called the Post Office took over control of residential phones from the GPO in 1969. Being a Public Corporation it would have had a trading account and HMG wouldn't have been micromanaging its operations or finances (As a public cirporation in would have operated like a private company, with a trading account, the only difference being that HMG was its only shareholder and so was responsible for administering profits and losses on the account). This was a half-way house before full-privatisation in the mid-1980s, so the managers of the Post Office (And then the BT public cirporation that followed in 1974) would have been attempting to apply commercial value techniques to their operations. Value snalysis and asset and labour tlisation would have been part of the armoury techniques applied then by a commercial organisation. So, the case was made that flown copper was maintenance intensive and should be replaced with easy maintenance aluminium /Little did they know), meanwhile a major cash injection was made to the Corporations balance sheet by the sale of recovered copper, which, in reality was what the change was all about.

 

No wonder they don't want to talk about it in an era of privatised business enterprise.

 

Nick

 

 

 

Edited 1 September, 201312 yr by Clunkclick

Digital Access Carrier System. Used to split one copper pair in to two lines by BT in the past because it was cheaper than running an additional pair.

 

I'd be surprised if they still do this given the majority of people would be running ADSL.

 

 

I'd be too as we had hordes of problems with FAXs on DAC lines .

 

My  opinion - bodge joint.   Possibly a heatshrinmed joint ., which never look pretty out in the open . Might even be a taped joint ( vulcanising tape with plastic on top)