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Comment by dghughes | Hacker News Reader

Here in SE Canada my 85 year-old uncle has a land line phone and it's been there forever it was there when his mom my grandmother lived there for 65 years.

Hurricane Fiona hit my region and all the phones eventually died cellphones, new landline "voip" (I guess?) but not my uncle's phone. It was the old style wired directly to the exchange a few blocks away.

I lost power for nearly two weeks he didn't. My home land line is the newer type not the old style so the modem had no power. My cellphone lasted a few days but the cell towers ran out of fuel for the generators.

I was completely isolated communication-wise for about a week and a half. If I had the old land line type I would have had a phone.

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There really shouldn't be a difference between the tower and the exchange, both need power to run and both are going to rely on modern data communication for anything not directly connected to the exchange. Cell phone power side at least makes sense, if you don't have any form of backup or off grid wattage yourself than getting power through the line is reasonably differentiating.

At least in my country, cell towers are numerous and get an equipment cabinet about the size of a fridge; telephone exchanges are one-per-city and the size of a small office building.

Much easier to provide a generator for the latter.

Yep, this was why as a kid we kept our landline even after we all got cellphones: Old-fashioned landlines were more likely to still work during a power outage.

That's a really weird loss of service.

land lines are the ones that depend on large-scale infrastructure, and go out with any natural disaster. Cellphones should be much more resilient.

Anyway, the current solution for emergency communications is satellite. We have nothing more resilient than throwing things up there above the atmosphere.

Landlines (at least the old school ones that ran the line all the way back to a big central office, before neighborhood multiplexing devices were so ubiquitous) relied on very centralized infrastructure that was easier to keep running in a disaster, you only needed to keep one building powered to keep the town's landlines up. Sure, long distance service may have gone down when the lines outside the area were disrupted, but you'd still be able to call the fire department or your mom across town. And since that one building was so important, they kept a big generator there with lots of fuel.

The cellular network is much more disperse which makes it resilient in some ways (since if the tower closest to you goes down, you can still probably get signal from another tower), but it's harder to keep them all running, and in many cases they rely on long-distance data lines out of the area to stay in service, so even if the cell tower is up and running, without that long distance data connection, you can't make a call.

Yes but except in remote areas or with specific natural features, where you can't get to other people easily, having a phone not cut for days is not critical enough that it justify maintaining a whole parallel infrastructure.

You may argue it does, but it's easy to figure out: in my country you can get it in some places, but it's an expensive premium.

Very few people do. Which mean they don't value it as much as they say they do. The ones that do usually are the ones that have the need to be able to call health institutions in emergency.

Turns out humanity survives very well without a phone, and while I get how it can become a big problem for an individual, on average for the whole society, it doesn't balance out.

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