Around 2014 or so, we (light infantry) had field telephones on the books, but we only used them once for a field exercise to practice assuming all modern tech was down.
20+ years ago, rewiring buildings for 1000baseT the Cisco switches (3650s maybe? 3750s? I know they had IPv6 multicast acceleration in the switch fabric because that's why we had them) would do this for any circuit on command, OK, 18 metres from here there's a fault, pace, pace, pace, I reckon it'll be up on this cable tray... yup, some fool tried to "repair" a broken Cat5 cable, we'll just rip it out, meanwhile patch to a different circuit.
Actually, I think it wasn't detecting faults but rather the length of cable connected.
They even went as far as having us string wire out to our ambush sites when we were on the Iraqi border during the first gulf war and reel it back up when we came in. Zero radio signals out there because they didn’t want them to know that a whole division plus French armor was there.
Modern tech is good and all unless you have some dumb Joe that keeps erasing the codes out of the radio by turning on the truck without putting it on standby or something…never quite figured that one out.
> dumb Joe that keeps erasing the codes out of the radio by turning on the truck without putting it on standby
Oh man, I have nightmares about comms. Juggling frequencies while traversing areas of operation, trying to get satcom working in mountainous terrain with jammers, and depending on the finicky windows-tablet encryption device, was not a fun time.