According to the company, traditional phone companies spend about half of their wired expenses on maintaining increasingly obsolete copper networks.

FORBES: AT&T Moves Dramatically Towards 'Internet Everywhere'

Carriers eager to retire legacy copper networks in favor of the fiber and wireless solutions that would natively transmit all information using Internet protocols may still need FCC permission to change or discontinue services even when better and cheaper alternatives are being offered.

FORBES: Creating a "Politics of Abundance" to Match Technology Innovation

Back in the day the plain-old-copper land networks were self powered and seldom failed.

FORBES: New York, Black Swans, Blackouts and Anti-Fragile Grids

It's also providing copper cable networks for the "last mile" of installed wire from central switches to homes and businesses, and products that help increase bandwidth, maintain signal integrity and optimize wavelength.

FORBES: Minnesota Mining & Catchall

The m100 took profits in shares of Optelecom (nasdaq: OPTC - news - people ), a Maryland company that sells systems to business and government for sending and receiving video, audio and data over copper wires and optical networks.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Why should competitors build innovative, ultra high-speed fiber networks that would provide real competition when the government is giving them a break on copper wire?

FORBES: The FCC Scores a Hat Trick of Errors on Internet Regulation

In the 1990s copper prices enjoyed a boom, thanks to strong demand from phone companies, which used the metal in the networks they were ferociously building.

FORBES: Forget Gold, Buy Copper

Speed of light is the scarcity that governs networks, whether on the surfaces of chips where signals move nine inches a nanosecond through miles of minuscule copper wires or across continents and oceans where latencies reach 60 milliseconds.

FORBES: Magazine Article