Architectural issues of legacy copper network

BT´s copper access network represents a huge investment made over many years. There are now over 30 million working copper pairs, contained in 2 million kilometres of cable, connecting the vast majority of the households and businesses in the UK. The network is therefore seen as a prime asset, but its historical nature also brings problems. This paper examines how these problems are being tackled, and how it is possible, given care, to make a legacy copper network work far harder than the original designers ever imagined