From The Register - Vodafone outage caused by robbery:
Cable stealing thieves were responsible for a network outage that left some Vodafone UK customers without service for most of yesterday.
A spokeswoman was unable to explain what the cables were for, but confirmed that the theft in north Wales caused the network downtime for most of Sunday.
She said: “There was a robbery of some cabling in north Wales and that caused parts of the network to go down. The Midlands, parts of the north-west and south-east, and north Wales were affected.”
“A spokeswoman was unable to explain what the cables were for”
I guess also telecom equipment needs power :), but at some point you need to use cables for the communication as well.