Copper Cable: A Historical PerspectiveOver a century ago, utility companies started to bury copper cable into the earth for the purpose of telephone connectivity. Perhaps no other investment in the history of modern business has been so nurtured, as this copper cable now represents a collective asset estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars. It's a cable plant that today criss-crosses over virtually every mile in all developing countries. And while much is made of the advanced communications information superhighway, the truth of the matter is that most of that road is still paved with workhorse copper cable.As time passed, individual houses and businesses were connected to their central telephone office via individual cables at, today's standard, very slow speeds. Central offices, on the other hand, were connected to each other with what would become known as a T1 or E1 line - comprised of 24 or 30 voice lines in one digital pipe. For clarification, the vernacular of T1 or E1 have come to be synonymous with certain speeds and with phone company-driven applications, however, in their most basic forms, T1 is simply a 1.544 megabit per second (Mbps) pipe and E1 is a 2.048 Mbps pipe that can be used for a wide variety of public and private communications - both existing and emerging. Initially, these T1/E1 links functioned as the backbone for voice, data, and video - the most critical, bandwidth-intensive arteries - between central offices, with lower speed feeder lines tapping into them. As it stands today, however, realities have shifted and T1/E1 lines have settled into a very specific role. Though the use of T1/E1 is still heavy for inter-office applications in smaller central offices, backbone status is now usually reserved for high-capacity media such as fiber, with T1/E1 being used as a building block or as an attachment to public and private backbones.
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