The use of wooden poles in telephony

Our conversational transmissions come through the infrastructure that exists in the telephone industry. This is all made possible by the widespread use of wooden poles as telephone poles to relay the zeros and ones that make up the conversation. It's strange that this age of computerization has reduced everything to a representation of zeros and ones - but that's the case. Gone (pretty much, anyway) are the analog signals that made up everything of only a decade ago - maybe two decades. And in transmittting the human voice, the wooden poles that grace the countryside do exactly the same thing they used to - only now, instead of carrying an analog signal, the now carry 0's and 1's. Although it was always a complex sequence of gates that resembled binary even then.