POTS (plain old telephone service) is really amazing in many ways. Huge reliability, independent of the ordinary power grid, dead simple consistent UI, etc.
(I have an IP phone at work, and it's an unintuitive unreliable beast.)
Right. It’s no big deal for anyone if there’s no mobile signal but no dial tone is shocking. Even when there’s a power cut the landlines still work. I have probably only experienced an outage of POTS a couple of times in my life.
Nitpick: typically they have excellent reception. _However,_ with many copper lines not being maintained and especially in some rural areas, reception can be awful to unusable.
The backbone is increasingly digital or wireless.
We have landlines at one facility that are terrible. Loud hum on every call. Rural area with poor cell service too.
And it works most of the time, even if the power goes down, there are storms or floods, as long as the wired connection is not down. When NYC lost power in the early oughties, guess which phones were still working? Yep, the pay phones and the landlines. Most of the cell phones were dying or dead. That said, I don't have one but my parents still do.
Used to be, although at least Verizon is actively tearing out copper as fast as they can, so that they aren't subject to the old telco regulations.
And in the US can be had for like $10 a month as opposed to $30 minimum for verizon prepaid