AT&T counted more than 7,000 copper theft and vandalism accidents this year
At a US Telecom event, AT&T called out an uptick in cases of copper theft and vandalism. Rhonda Johnson, AT&T’s EVP of federal regulatory relations, said that AT&T counted more than 7,000 of these incidents in 2025, with many of them being in repeat locations. These incidents have cost the carrier more than $60 million to repair the damage and get the affected network up and running. Of course, this money could've been spent on deployment.
Meanwhile, Verizon notes that California and Texas have been major vandalism hotspots. Roughly half of the incidents have happened there, said Kathy Grillo, Verizon's SVP of Government Affairs and Public Policy. Grillo argued that there needs to be stricter state regulations and better public awareness, and these changes could make a difference in reducing theft.
Image Credit - AT&T
The issue is affecting all carriers, not just AT&T and Verizon
Overall, the industry is collectively pushing to fight network vandalism.
Last month, NCTA, SCTE, and some other operator executives started a coalition to coordinate actions against criminal attacks on the network infrastructure. The coalition is called STRIKE.
Meanwhile, Charter went as far as to call network damage "domestic terrorism", while unfortunately, network vandalism is classified as a felony in only 28 states.
It seems that vandals mistakenly think that fiber lines are copper.
Unfortunately, these vandalism incidents are not the only issues that carriers have to think about nowadays. We also have plenty of issues with malicious users trying to breach carrier's networks and gain access to sensitive user information. This is another way that ill-intended people are causing damages to carriers.
As you can probably imagine, the carriers are not the only ones to suffer from these sorts of incidents. After all, the people who lose access to their network are hurt as well.
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Have you ever lost service because of a network outage or vandalism?
Yep, more than once — it’s frustrating
100%
Once or twice, but it got fixed fast
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Not yet, and I hope it stays that way
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I had no idea this was even a thing
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Copper theft is still a big problem – and not just for carriers
It's wild to think that in 2025, copper theft is still such a big issue. You'd imagine that with most networks moving to fiber, this would've faded out by now.
But clearly, it hasn't – and the fact that people are damaging fiber thinking it's copper just makes it worse. It's not only costly for carriers, but also frustrating for customers who lose service because of it. I am a person who needs a strong connection all day, every day, and to think that just because somebody thought the fiber cable was copper, I'll be left without connectivity, frankly, puts me on edge.
Hopefully, with more awareness and tougher laws, we'll start seeing fewer of these incidents soon, and all carriers will spend the money they lose to fix these things on improving their networks, covering more places with reliable and super-fast 5G, and fixing other issues that occur in network operations.
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