How Orange successfully fights copper theft


Maxence Glineur

January 13, 2023 at 08:00

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copper cables © © Pixabay

©Pixabay

The price of this metal, so important to our infrastructure, has increased dramatically since the beginning of the decade, to the point of making more and more criminals greedy.

Hundreds of cases of copper cable theft are to be counted in 2022 throughout France. Faced with this, Orange gave permission to two irreducible Bretons to test several types of parades of their own.

Copper at a gold price

Between an exploding demand in China, and an increased investment in renewable energies which badly need it, copper has seen its price more than double in five years. Thus, it now resells very well on the black market, and it has become quite possible to make its theft a lucrative business. A cable of a few hundred meters could be sold for a few thousand euros, for operations that can be brief, lasting around ten minutes, and difficult for law enforcement to understand.

In Brittany alone, the damage is counted in millions of euros for Orange. In 2022, the company counted 82 thefts that caused inconvenience to 10,500 users and weeks of repairs. But the operator is not the only one affected, since the SNCF records, for its part, a loss of around twenty million euros over the same year. Despite the deployment of drones, alarms, tracers and preventive measures, no less than 40,000 journeys have been affected by thefts of metals such as copper.

Cookies created from commercially available systems.

Assigned to major repair work in Brittany and the Pays de la Loire, two Orange employees proposed to their management to set up parades. By taking systems found on the market, such as shutter opening systems or GPS, and modifying them to meet their needs, they have made it possible to apprehend five teams of thieves since October. The effect is already visible, since their snitches have limited the cases of theft in their sector, until they have disappeared for several days.

Orange wishes to generalize this approach throughout France. With the aim of deploying around ten systems with different technologies, the idea will ultimately be to allow the police to be immediately notified of the facts, without the operator having to warn them. These systems will thus considerably increase the chances of arrest, while discouraging thieves from taking action.

Even if the ADSL network is at the end of its life, metals such as copper are essential for the modernization of our electrical infrastructures, among other things, and nothing suggests a drop in prices for the moment. Thus, such solutions, like those imagined by our two Bretons, should be increasingly deployed in the future, to end up becoming a real standard in different industries.

Source : Telegram



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