As someone who has spent a majority of his career in Telecom, I think the risk is wildly overstated. First - only 20-60% of the cable in the wild is lead (depe

As someone who has spent a majority of his career in Telecom, I think the risk is wildly overstated. First - only 20-60% of the cable in the wild is lead (depending on the locality, and age of construction), from the mid to late 60's on, PIC (or other similar plastic covered cable) was installed. Also, as capacity was added in between 1980 and 2000, lead cable was removed from service over time. Second - Yes, You're gonna get exposed to lead working in the field on wired telecom, I have some measure of exposure, lead is not good - but its a risk to employees who work on the legacy wired plant. "Shalini Ramachandran: I talked to a number of women who worked in AT&T central offices doing lead soldering work, connecting lead sheathed cables from the outside with the internal central office machinery. They actually showed gloves with the fingertips cut off because they had to do sort of small, intricate work to melt the solder with a soldering iron. So, they describe breathing in those fumes. They're not being sort of fans or exhaust around and feeling headaches often every day coming home from work and gastrointestinal issues, nausea, constipation, infertility issues, miscarriages. One woman had developed kidney cancer and had to have a kidney removed." Though I see one glaring issue with the way the mention things here - by the time a cable reached the main frame of a CO, they were stripped from their sheath - yes they wore fingerless gloves because you needed to be able to wrap the fine copper wire around the lug on the frame, and then solder it with an iron who's tip is roughly the size of a human thumb. That wire though is copper, and the wire from the field was on the back side of the frame, not the front side where the regular work was done to run jumpers. That said, the solder users was lead based. I have no doubt AT&T studied blood lead levels among employees (AT&T had a how-to document on sweeping), they had a document for every purpose, and studied every aspect of their operations. Those studies were done just before we understood how harmful lead is, it was known to be not good, but not how bad even safe levels of lead could be for humans. Third - while there is a risk to the general public, its generally infinitesimally small - meaning there is probably more lead in the soil from cars going by for 40-50 years with leaded gasoline, than there is from the buried lead cable underground, or the areal lead cable overhead on the poles. Fourth - Most of this plant is either going to be abandoned or replaced within 20ish years. Copper last mile is a declining business, even AT&T (nee SBC) is moving to a FTTP from a FTTN architecture. Meaning outside of some remediation costs, removing it from the ground and/or poles will be enough to solve this.