A friend in Chesapeake Virginia was told his copper would be pulled a while ago, but it has yet to happen. They are super excited -- at this point there is no FiOS in his area, only Cox Communications cablemodems. People want FiOS but so far no roll out. When the copper gets pulled, fiber gets delivered. I agree with lack of telco powered loops but we are at the point/close to the point where our phones work without the local cell network being online. And solar power is pretty easy and common as long as sun is out. On another subject, I still slowly fish around for 5ESS phone switches. My goal was to reduce the footprint to get it into a rack or two, and try to find more than one. I've read that you can run the management platform (the Admin module) on a Sun host with an emulator, but not sure if a PCI card is needed. They use Netra T1125ish -- probably why those DC versions existed. As well as the ones for listening into phone calls (CALEA.) Netra T1 takes that down to 1u. Then CM, SM and DC power remains. My hope was to find a number of them and put them in hands of various museums. East, maybe SysSrc if Bob wants one, Bloop, etc. Then they could be networked via ShadyTel or something. I dunno. So far it's been hard to make the right connections, and I've seen the videos where people ended up with qty 24 x 21" telco racks and that isn't appealing at the moment due to space. Thoughts?