Once upon a time, a colleague from South Africa told me that they use fiber cable everywhere. I was surprised by this that they seem to be more advanced than us. Turns out that copper wire gets stolen, so they have no choice...

There's an old network admin adage that if you ever need a backhoe to show up, all you need to do is bury some fiber optic cable.

Soon enough a backhoe will magically appear to sever your buried fiber.

This trick works great if you ever get lost. They say a master network admin always carries 6ft of fiber optic just for this reason.

In my experience, you can easily find any buried telecom cable as long as you dig several feet away from the marked utility lines.

"Backhoe fade"

Looks like the same is happening here:

> The next step the agency is considering is using fiberglass composite instead of aluminum to construct guard rails “to remove the value to the thieves.”

Near my home in the pacific northwest region of the US, I saw at a construction site a big spool (~1m diameter, 1+ meter tall) of cable with "Fiber, NOT copper" spray painted on its side. I cannot imagine how frustrating it would be to have a project like that delayed because some junkies stole a few hundred pounds of fiber optic cable, just to discard it when they realized that it wasn't something they could easily fence.

They also have far more mobile phones than landlines, because it's easier and cheaper to put up a few towers than run wires to every building.

http://geographylists.com/list21n.html

Plenty of stories about yahoos hitching their pickup to a telephone repeater box around where I live to pull the copper cable only to find it's fibre. You can't beat stupid.

Yep. You occasionally see alarmist articles about the rate of metal theft in places like South Africa, but this is an issue every where. Different rates but it is there. I say alarmist because, they aren't done to inform but most to shock readers.

About a year back here in Australia, so a wealthy country, my local council had the issue where over night, 500 meters of copper water pipe was stolen over night. Have to admit I was kind of impressed at the scale of it.

What I did find interesting in OP's article was the mention of the US Tariffs. I didn't create the problem but it certainly will accelerate it. Interesting times.

In the third world, people gang up against criminals and police comes and beats them too. After a few manhole covers were stolen by the typical group, half the village went to their "neighborhood" until they got the covers back.

My wife said in South Africa, growing up in the 1980s, everything metal was harvested like old growth forest. I guess people are as destitute everywhere now.