I’m doing a school project in engineering studies and i was just wondering what are the main uses are for copper in telecommunications engineering?

I would like to get information for the products (other than Spectrometer, and physical laboratory testing through reactions). available in market that allow to do a chemical analysis of mild steel. i would be interested in finding the following elements manganese, silicon, nickel, chromium, aluminium, molybdenum and copper. Also not forgetting the ‘impurities’ such as phosphorous and sulphur.

From the main building, I am dealing with underground telephone cable (cable is meant for and armored for underground use and contains 100 pair of wires) and runs about 350 feet to another building; this cable runs underneath a two-lane highway. The cable was installed perhaps better than 40 years ago. Lately, when there is a heavy rainfall, some of the telephone circuits on these line gets a bit of static or cuts our all together (the telephones used on these lines are Nortel digital telephones with a Meridian controller and line cards).

With the number of problems I have been experiencing, should I suspect I am having wire pair going bad and should probably replace the cable. Would it be worth while to replace the cable with fiber-optic, especially since I am driving some computer network traffic over some of these cable pair via ADSL modem repeaters. My other option would be to replace the cable with a new copper twisted pair cable.