They replaced cables, a far cry from the South African Telkom, who are abandoning copper as "uneconomical", and are as busy as possible trying to roll out fibre instead. Yet still in the process of racing to be the smallest player, a far cry from a quarter century ago when they were the monopoly, and have been made a has been by the march of technology, and them refusing to give up the cash cow of infrastructure copper.
You needed a phone line to get DSL, no local loop unbundling till later, and no naked DSL till this year, just when the announcement came they are exiting the copper line market. Lost out because they would limit line speed down unless you paid for the higher speeds, and would never allow naked DSL, despite more than half the phone lines using DSL did not have a phone attached. Slow to bring in fibre, and eclipsed by the mobile operators and the wireless providers, at least till their stranglehold and monopoly on long links was broken, along with international carrier traffic.
Report a fault and that 18 month wait might be for them to respond to you with a single reply, and actually resolving the problem is a toss up of them fixing it by changing the port on the DSLAM, rolling the fault to somebody else, or them saying "it is a cable fault, handing off to outdoor tech" and you are in another 19 month wait, but still are required to pay for the line in the interim, unless you cancel the service outright, and good luck getting the refund.