Easy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1998_North_American_ic...

A lot of the Northeast US that was impacted has fairly 'fresh' copper infrastructure in the last 20 years.

... but in reality, yeah. The outdoor plant does not get taken care of well (in general), there's only so many field techs to go around to be able to re-balance an entire RF system and its nodes.