. The landline will not fail in the event of power failure.
2. In the event of 911 type emergency your call will be routed to the closest PSAP and answered by local service who will know where you are.
These are the standard selling points by the phone company to get you to keep paying big money for a landline phone.
(1) The one time when I absolutely needed my land-line it was out.
This was a while back. A policeman came to our front door and said my Dad had been in a traffic accident. We were needed at the hospital to OK surgery. They had been trying to get through to us by phone, BUT THE LANDLINE PHONE WAS OUT.
(1b) Cell phones also work in case of a power outage. In fact (imho) a cell phone is superior to a landline phone in this regard. If I need to abandon the house (say because of fire) I can take the cell phone with me.
(2) 911 is being instituted for cell phones, so I think this is a non starter.
(2b) With the GPS functionality being added to cell phones (currently “there’s an app for that,” but it’ll be standard soon), it won’t be long till emergency services can pinpoint your location no matter where your are. In your home or on a lonely dirt road, they’ll just look up your location via gps.
Nope.
You had an experience but the phone company isn’t selling you anything. Sure, they want to sell lines but I am their competitor and absolutely insist my customers have a single back up line from the local telco.
I get paid nothing on that line but part of our service is disaster planning, recognizing they will happen and building solutions around that eventuality.
See this link for more information:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2680871/posts?page=34#34
Hospitals, Fire Stations, National Guard Armories and Police stations have built in redundancy mandate by your local PUC.
The electric grid is built so it can fail when required but if you happen to live in the same grid as one of those, the power will not go out. The local utility places huge Marine Batteries in the CO and at the electrical grid location where emergency services are located. They also have diesel powered generators that will automatically power up in the event the batteries fail and the mandate for most of those is they deliver power for 4-10 days.