I appreciate that it may feel like everything is fine, but generally the problematic decay is something that takes time to trickle up to the point that you will

I appreciate that it may feel like everything is fine, but generally the problematic decay is something that takes time to trickle up to the point that you will experience it. When you see the telephone wires on the polls, those are big bundles of pairs that terminate in your neighborhood and your CO. Generally, there are more pairs delivered to your neighborhood than are needed. This is because a short can be difficult to access, so it is helpful to have excess capacity to simply switch the connection for a home to a different pair. But the years of declining land line use and revenues have resulted in cutbacks of folks who do cable repair. When the phone was the only network we had and when long distance calls had electrons flowing directly over thousands of miles of a dedicated circuit, you could justify the cost of repair. But without that, all you have is "switch to a new pair. Hopefully one exists. Move on as quickly as possible to the next customer." It isn't a line of bs. Keep in mind that those phone wires you are looking at are not one super long run of pairs from C.O. to the neighborhood. It's many, many splaced together segments, with varying cable swaps between the c.o. and the destination that can be hard to undo. The historical availability of the network leads people to take its existence for granted. The last time I made the kind of long distance calls that funded these network was over 15 years ago.