But as necessity is the mother of invention, engineers designed a way to move signals at relatively high speeds over copper. Inherently, copper wire distorts signal quality, so repeaters or amplifiers are used, tapping into copper cable at prescribed intervals to restore signal quality. And therein lies the problem. The process can take several weeks for one line. Installation of repeaters may require re-engineering.
Repeaters can be numerous, and upon failure, troubleshooting and maintenance is costly.
All of this labor comes at a time when public and private organizations are reducing workforces. All of these drawbacks pointed to the need for a better way of delivering advanced digital services to end users. The telephone companies saw the realities. So they started looking for a better way, and in the late 1980s the collective research arm of the Bell operating companies, Bellcore, devised a new method. HDSL leverages the huge amount of existing copper cable, delivering a streamlined alternative to the installation of competing solutions.