Quote:
Originally Posted by Seahawk
The cell towers are more reliable than land lines in my area. I no longer have wired phone service. If the towers ar down, the land lines are down.
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Well, the land lines should not necessarily be out of service if the towers are. If you live within 20 miles or so of a central office your landline phone could be being powered by a trickle charge coming in on the copper wires from the c.o.. Many times when we have had an area power outage my land line phone will still work, even during/after severe storms like hurricanes and tornadoes. ! On the other hand, if your land line phone is being served from a remote switching site it could go dead with everything else. In my area, a major percentage of the copper and fiber cables run underground. This protects them from most lightning strikes, falling trees,broken poles, etc. Also, the remote switching sites have standby/reserve batteries to keep the switch up and running for about 8 hours. Even the very small remote sites serving less than 100 lines are battery equipped! If you are fortunate enough to live in a home that is served by "fiber to the home" you should seldom have an outage! Each central office has a large standby generator and a several hundred gallon fuel tank. In summary, today's telephone network is very robust and generally difficult to shut down for long!