I retired this year from one of the big telecom companies that used to end in Bell, and copper theft was insane. We recycled our scrap, and thieves would drive in and ransack our scrap bins. Our repair crews would respond to an outage, only to find hundreds of feet of cable missing. The worst was when they would cut a fiber cable expecting to find copper, and just move on. I’ve seen that result in everything from downed internet to the loss of 911 calls, and towns being isolated from communicating with the outside world.
Not good.