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Majority of US Households Now Cellphone-Only, Government Says (networkworld.com)
The National Center for Health Statistics has released a report that says, for the first time in history, U.S. households with landlines are now in the minority. Network World reports: The second 6 months of 2016 was the first time that a majority of American homes had only wireless telephones. Preliminary results from the July-December 2016 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) indicate that 50.8% of American homes did not have a landline telephone but did have at least one wireless telephone (also known as cellular telephones, cell phones, or mobile phones) -- an increase of 2.5 percentage points since the second 6 months of 2015. Young adults (25-34) and those who rent are most likely to live wireless-only, as 70 percent of that demographic lives with a landline.
That depends on the area. In many places, cell towers have as little as 24 hours of backup power. Most COs for POTS lines have a week or more.
The actual copper is often buried where it won't be blown down by storms, unlike a tower.
Wow really? A tower blown over by a storm? If that's going on you're not going to care about local cell coverage because you should have evacuated long before that point. Towers don't blow over.
The power issue however is real, but over the years I've lost my POTS connection far more often than my cell phone due to failed ageing equipment, backhoes doing what they do best and ripping through infrastructure, and just plain incompetence from people trying to manage the ratnest of wire that makes up a typical copper phone line connection.