Cricket shill here. I’ve had cricket for years, it’s affordable and has good perks like free roaming in Mexico and Canada. It’s just an MVNO of ATT last I checked, so if ATT went down cricket would too.
Analog telephony was still built on a complex automated network. Those rooms full of operators manually connecting callers by plugging in physical wires haven’t been a thing for 70 years. They even started going digital in the ‘60s.
I’m talking pre cell and pre internet domination. My grandma’s house /neighborhood lost power this winter and there was always the reliable old long corded landline that we ordered pizza with as a matter of fact.
Sure, but no switches lost power in this outage. And yes the power in my home could be on, but if the phone company itself has no electricity 🙃 then sure.
But generally speaking, that doesn’t happen, and it didn’t happen here. Land lines work without power in nearly all circumstances because the power comes through the land line itself.
But the statement you’re making is a silly one. I could say “your cell phone will never work when all the cell towers are powered down and you don’t have wifi and your phone company has no power either. 😑”
Still I’ve never had a land line not work when the power in large areas around me goes out.
“BUT WHAT IF YOU DON’T PAY YOUR BILL AND YOUR PHONE COMPANY IS PART OF A BUSINESS HOSTILE TAKEOVER AND THEY ABANDON YOU As A CUSTOMER”
uhhh… yeah I guess it won’t work then. Like what are you trying to prove here?
I think you missed the entire point, the outage in the article was caused by a Cisco update gone wrong, its the switch hard and software they make… If its an update or a power outage isn’t relevant, it can happen to everything,
And i literally said the only actually 99.99% reliable things are long distance radio and satellite. None of these are usually hooked up to a the grid, unless you need a relay station for the radio.
The thing is that you’re both right: your landline at your home would continue to work during a power outage, assuming the central office still had power or there wasn’t a mechanical failure there. And if the CO went down, your phone would stop working. And this is a case of the CO going down.
When it was copper they did, because the switch had pretty good power redundancy and backup generators. I live near a large Verizon cell switch and it still has very large generators because an outage there would be way worse than just some towers going down.
I saw on the local news this morning that an AT&T outage meant that people on mobile networks other than AT&T couldn’t call 911 here (San Francisco Bay Area). Their suggested workaround was to make sure you have wifi calling enabled. Okay cool thanks I’ll just make sure that my emergencies only happen in areas with good wifi.
The best part of it too was for Wi-Fi calling, if it was off, couldn’t be turned on since it relied on AT&T’s website/capabilities to approve and authenticate. That was at least my experience as well as my family’s.
So if you hadn’t already enabled it before the outage, you literally couldn’t turn it on.
Thankfully I already had it enabled since the area in and around my house seems like a dead zone for cell phone signal. I only have one bar of signal when I’m inside.
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