If you live in an area with all copper lines back to the central office, you&#x27;re probably good unless you have a cordless phone.<p>You probably connect to a neighborhood SLC hut (a filing cabinet sized green box?) that converts a neighborhood to optical or perhaps a T-1 or perhaps a HDSL T-1 and feeds that single line back to partner equipment in the CO.  There is usually a short term battery on the SLC hut (sometimes they catch fire).<p>The bigger problem is the most likely reason to lose power is aerial lightning strike or tree downing the cables.  Its very unusual to lose power for any other reason away from the coasts, never had rolling blackouts or whatever.  So the only time I&#x27;d need to make a call (to the electric company?) is when the landline phone would be knocked out anyway either by lightning fried phone or cables laying on the ground under a tree.  That was one of the nice parts of getting my first cell phone a bit over 20 years ago was I could call in power failures or whatever.  Not that it happens enough to matter, LOL.<p>With modern smart meters the electric company gets pretty fast stats on downed lines anyway, so there&#x27;s not much point in calling.<p>My uncle-in-law in a nursing home has a landline.  Not a PBX extension off the nursing home but for whatever weird legal &#x2F; financial reasons he has his own account with the phone company much like an apartment building has separate accounts rather than a business PBX.  I suspect folks like him are part of the 8% who have a landline and no cell phone, and that number will never drop to zero.