Telecoms Knew About Toxic Cable Pickle?

WSJ writes AT&T & Verizon “knew toxic lead cables could leach into environment & did nothing.” Telecoms retort the number of lead cables still around is exaggerated & removal could cause more harm than it’s worth. Talk about an organic pickle.

Other telecoms caught in the Catch 22 include Frontier & Lumen, as the industry faces a “potentially huge liability” while “other market forces drag” on. Meanwhile, their stock shares are tanking faster than a dropped call. The newspaper blames “sharply rising interest rates” and “slowing real-estate & construction demand for the industry’s services. Ditto “the fading 5G cycle” for the wireless businesses that include telecom equipment.

“We have not seen, nor have regulators identified, evidence that legacy lead-sheathed telecom cables are a leading cause of lead exposure or the cause of a public health issue,” stated the USTelecom trade group. Yet, one industry expert was quoted as observing that the “carriers themselves likely don’t know the full extent of the problem given the age of [their] legacy networks plus all the changes in ownership that have resulted from several waves of telecom mergers since then. The unsatisfying, but honest answer,” he said, “is that at this point we have nothing but unknowns to work with & no real way to quantify the companies’ exposure.”

Davd Soul