Short answer: fiber optic cable has no copper, so scrap yards pay between nothing and about $0.70 per pound — and many refuse it outright. An intact reel with its tag is a different item entirely: it sells by the foot, for several times the best scrap outcome.
| Route | What you get | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Scrap yard | $0–0.70/lb, if they take it | You haul it. Many yards decline fiber. |
| Surplus buyer (us) | One firm written offer per reel, priced from the tag | Photos and a phone call. Freight is ours. |
| List it yourself online | Highest gross, in theory | Months of listings, fees, freight quotes, no-shows. |
Scrap pricing is metals pricing. Copper telecom cable is worth money because it is copper. Fiber is glass, gel, aramid yarn and a polyethylene jacket — the strength member might be a thin steel wire, and armored cable adds a corrugated tape, but there is no recoverable metal mass worth chasing. Most yards price it as mixed plastic at best. The $0.70/lb figure that circulates on forums is a ceiling that assumes armored cable and a yard willing to process it, not a going rate.
Value lives in the strands and the footage, not the weight. We price each reel from its tag: fiber count, series, part number, footage, date code and condition.
Long continuous footage, legible tags, a name-brand series and sealed ends push a reel’s value up. Unknown footage, old date codes and missing tags pull it down. Send the tag photos and you get one firm offer in writing within 24 hours. The number doesn’t change at pickup.
A 10,000 ft reel of 96 count loose tube runs on the order of 800–1,200 lb of cable depending on jacket and armor — the reel tag lists the exact gross weight, so check yours rather than trusting a rule of thumb.
Best-case scrap: at the forum-famous $0.70/lb, that is roughly $560–840 — if you find a yard that accepts fiber, and you truck it there yourself.
Same reel, sold as surplus: priced by the foot from its tag, with one firm offer in writing within 24 hours and freight booked and paid by us.
Scrapping that reel throws away the footage it still carries. That is the whole reason this page exists.
Cut ends under roughly 1,000 ft with no continuous run left. Crushed reels where the cable has taken a hard kink. Water sitting inside an unsealed cut end. Jacket burned or stripped. That material is genuinely scrap, and we will tell you so rather than waste your afternoon.
Find the tag on the reel flange. It carries the fiber count, the series and part number, the footage, and the date code — everything anyone needs to price it. Photograph it straight on.
No tag? The cable jacket is printed with sequential footage marks every few feet. Photograph the print at both ends: the end mark minus the start mark is your remaining footage. Photograph the jacket legend too — it usually carries the manufacturer and fiber count.
Not sure what you’re looking at? Send the photo anyway. Identifying reels is literally our job.
Photos of the tags and your ZIP. Firm written offer within 24 hours. Freight is ours.
Compramos también — atendemos en español.
Sitting on reels from a finished job? We buy them — tag photos to WhatsApp, offer in 24 hours. How we price a reel →