said by waffull:A home phone SHOULD BE a requirement... preferably a true landline. During natural and man made disasters, a good old fashioned copper/CCA line is going to almost always work. VOIP will not work unless you have power backup. Cell phones are, at best, 50/50.
That's a pretty sweeping overgeneralization. And it's easy to pontificate that something should be a requirement when you're not the one that has to pay for it. God save us from the "safety nuts", they've already made it so kids can't play like we did when we were kids.
said by waffull:Consider it a really cheap insurance policy. Even if you no longer pay for service, the phone company is required to keep your line alive for 911 calls. No oversubscribing of cell towers, no network preemption for emergency services (See ATT's supposed "parallel" network.) Do yourself, your family and your friends a favor... For a pittance, keep your landline.
First of all, it's not that cheap in many parts of the country, especially after you add all the hidden fees and taxes. Second, some phone companies are better about maintaining their lines than others, do you know that yours will be Johnny-on-the-spot to make any needed repairs? And natural disasters destroy phone lines, too. Buried lines are frequently cut by other utilities and others doing excavating, and overhead lines are just as susceptible as electric lines to damage.
Also, the idea of you having a solid copper pair direct to the central office is pretty much a myth for people like you in a rural area; there's a very high probability that your line is converted to fiber at one of those big green boxes and that converter requires electricity to work. Yeah, it probably has a battery backup that will keep you going for at least part of a day, assuming the battery has been maintained and correctly hooked up (that's not always a given), but sooner or later those converters will be dead as a doornail if they don't get power.
After hurricane Katrina there were places where the regular phone lines had stopped working but VoIP continued to work. So sure, go ahead any buy your "cheap insurance" if you really believe it makes you safer, but honestly it would be a lot cheaper to get a battery powered ham or CB radio so that on the (hopefully rare) occasion where you have no other way to communicate you can still talk to someone in the "outside world" without paying a ridiculous monthly rate (AND maybe "long distance" rates to anyplace outside your limited "local calling area"). Or you could do what people have done for eons and realize there is always risk in life, and it's the risk you haven't planned for that will probably get you in the end.
