When I lived in a rural area, cell service was as reliable as landlines if not more. People frequently crashed into utility poles and brought landline service down. Cell towers have backup power and can work during outages. Personally I have an electric car which could charge my phone thousands of times in a power outage situation; of course even a gasoline powered car can charge a phone too in a pinch. The biggest problem with cell service during an emergency is congestion, but landlines are not immune to this either with the way networks are built today.
In the future, home batteries and solar are going to be much more common. And soon your cell phone will be able to go directly to space, bypassing any local tower problem, using Starlink's direct-to-cell feature. Reliability can be designed into modern systems and we don't need to cling to costly and wasteful outdated technologies like copper landlines simply because they used to be reliable.
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When I lived in a rural area, cell service was as reliable as landlines if not more. People frequently crashed into utility poles and brought landline service down. Cell towers have backup power and can work during outages. Personally I have an electric car which could charge my phone thousands of times in a power outage situation; of course even a gasoline powered car can charge a phone too in a pinch. The biggest problem with cell service during an emergency is congestion, but landlines are not immune to this either with the way networks are built today.
In the future, home batteries and solar are going to be much more common. And soon your cell phone will be able to go directly to space, bypassing any local tower problem, using Starlink's direct-to-cell feature. Reliability can be designed into modern systems and we don't need to cling to costly and wasteful outdated technologies like copper landlines simply because they used to be reliable.