I used to recommend to customers with young children and older folks to keep a landline for emergencies, because you can call 911 and know you will get emergency responders enroute, even if you can't talk. This is especially important in areas that are hit with a large scale disaster, hurricanes, earthquakes, blizzards, etc.. I understand that lines may be taken down by damage, but that doesn't always mean the line goes dead. Anyways, back to the point, things are changing and I want to know what everyone is doing to prepare their customers.
Below is a basic breakdown of the old versus current/coming systems.

Old communication system:

Landline phones.......powered at source...Phone Company hubs have back-up
generators.
Cell phones 4G & older.....battery powered....most towers 4G and older have back- up generators.

New communication systems:

Digital phones...unpowered line....local hubs have no long-term power back-up,
when neighborhood loses power, lines go down, even if home has back-up power.
Cell phones 5G....battery powered....antennas have shorter range necessitating in
more locations, usually just a single antenna on a 20'-30' pole with no back-up
power, except maybe a small battery back-up.

In a few years, as 5G becomes the dominate cell-phone system, and the 4G and older systems go EOL, how are people supposed to communicate when the systems are down because a massive black-out?
Having gone thru a few hurricanes in Florida and a few here in Texas, and then a massive black-out this year because of a freeze, I see our ways of communicating have changed and may seem to be getting better. However, is the improved performance worth giving up important safety redundancies?
After the hurricanes hit 17 years ago we lost power, we were still able to make land-line calls and could only text with our cell-phones. We could watch TV with a power back-up if we had DTV or Dish.
This year, after the state lost power from the freeze, cell phones worked, but only main towers had back-up generators, so reception was just ok. DTV and Dish would still work if you had back-up power, but no land-line phones.

Maybe Starlink is a possible semi-solution. But that still requires back-up power, which not everyone can afford.

Yes, I'm concerned about this too.

In bygone days the wired phone network was usually the last utility to go down and the first to return. The central office ran on battery power and there was a backup generator. The central office could run indefinitely without the power grid. The phone company was anal about reliability. At one point there was a major fire in a Manhattan central office. While the building was still burning, reconstruction planning was underway. The next morning a new ESS was parked out front. Unfortunately it required many weeks to install.

During Hurricane Sandy I was living in the suburbs and power was scheduled to be out for a few days. Presently, I noticed that a temporary gasoline powered generator had been hung on a nearby pole to support CATV.

Of course there is COW (Cell-on-wheels), but supply is finite.

Regardless of COW, users must be able to charge their phones. One strategy is to charge in a car, assuming that the user has a car has a fully charged battery and/or the car has fuel. Another strategy is to keep a pack of batteries charged and hope that a COW arrives. From an environmental impact standpoint I don't like the explosion (dual meaning implied) of batteries that this implies. Another solution is a small solar charging station. As household solar panels become more pervasive, neighbors could help neighbors with a charge.

The final savior will probably be the old standby -- the radio amateur.

RE 4g going away. FCC rules indicate that 4g will be supported through until 2030.

Please...

The last syllable in that word is pronounced like the number eight. You mean dominant, with the last syllable rhyming with "punt."

For instance, "as 5G becomes the dominant (an adjective) cell-phone system...." it will dominate (a verb) the cell phone landscape.

The FCC will mandate the PROVIDERS maintain a certain level of coverage during an outage for things like cell phones, etc. The SUBSCRIBER will have to keep their devices charged and ready. I don't recall the SLA's off the top of my head but the current wireline offerings have at least 5 priority levels for service protection and restoration.
The phone company wasn't just anal about reliability, they had to meet regulatory requirements. If they missed the uptime number, they were heavily fined.

it's easier to keep the newer cell sites up and running on a combination of batteries and generators since most of the equipment uses less power and far less cooling than a GPRS or 3g site.
The geographic distribution of cell sites also helps since losing a single site rarely impacts a large area.

The old POTS systems were designed to maintain a level of service when they were the primary communications system, and most of that reliability was mandated as a result of continuity of government and emergency services. It was astronomically expensive to build and operate, but it was the only way to provide service.

Today you can build a robust comms system for a fraction of the operational costs of the old backbone, so it's not only cheaper, it's faster, more capable and even more resilient. If you ever go back and study the cold war communications systems that AT&T built you will be stunned by the level of engineering they put into maintaining dial tone. I've been able to visit a couple of the old CO's and Microwave sites, it is very impressive.

We just went though a series of tornadoes that destroyed a wide swath of land along with the power poles, towers, etc. They were able to route around most of the damage in less than 8 hours and restore service to all but the most damaged areas, which didn't have much left to service since the homes were destroyed.

Please... relax Professor Keating.I think we all understood. (I'll save you the google energy, it was Dead Poets Society.)

Any phone line input?

This is 'Remote Central', not 'Grammar & Spelling Central'.

Lighten up, Francis.

If the providers and communities have a clue, they would use something like this-

[Link: towerdirect.net]

You have objections to being shown how to say something better? If the objection is that the topic under discussion wasn't grammar, well, are any of us going to go look up grammar as a subject in order to learn to do it gooder, or will it just have to come to us piecemeal?


Yes.

As long as there are dweebs like Ajit Pai in the world, "solutions" that are improper for the world in general will be proposed. It's good to discuss these things -- these discussions today may well save lives some day.

A disaster of some sort will occur in the next few years, one involving lack of communication, that would not have happened if a CO somewhere had not switched its DC away from batteries. And, for instance, you can get marginal service out of a battery that is low on charge, but when a generator is its version of "low on charge," it just plain quits.

By the way, it's written that old CO DC backups are generators. Are you saying that batteries are gone as backup power?

I don't have a problem as long as it's not a constant habit. Most of us who know the difference can let it pass because it's not like a light switch- someone who uses an incorrect tense, word, punctuation or makes some other grammatical error can't change instantly.

And you should have written 'goodly', since 'to do it...' requires an adverb. :)

there are several stuff in the discussion

1) On a personal note I have a land line and prefer it when talking for a long time so I will probably always have one at home, used with a cordless phone (and a corded one in case it is needed)

2) Very rarely my land line has had no service for a very short time and very rarely my cell has been dead for a very short time, I don't see either as more dependable.

3) As far as 5g is concerned who care, 5g, 4g, 6g.... all need a charged phone that works and a cell tower that works I don't see the difference.

4) as for starlink, I see it more like a problem then a solution to anything (compared to standard GEO satelite systems).

The benefits are
1) less latency (how fast a signal gets from A to B)

minuses
1) you need a lot more satellites to cover the same area (lower height means less range on earth)
2) the life expectancy of the satellites is much shorter (because they are low orbit air friction will play a much bigger role and so its carburant which is limited supply will end up getting used up faster)


If latency is critical for the usage and those microseconds count then it is not a bad idea, but because of the minuses it will always be a much more expensive solution then what is there now for them. Is it likely to help move rural hard to reach places to go high speed? probably not. IMHO it is just Musk taking advantage of the system (get gouvernment grants to bring high speed to rural/hard to reach spaces, pay space X to send satellites into orbit, use the system he is building for himself and some corporate clients where latency is important, people in rural hard to reach places don't sign up because it is too expensive to use)

At some point there will be a big opportunity for an orbital junk collector.

Been covered- it wasn't only space junk, but.....

That is only nine years away, not a very long time.

Recharging cell phone batteries when there is no power is really not a problem anymore. We battery back-ups, personal generators or neighbors with one, car chargers, battery-powered inverters (Milwaukee, Ryobi, DeWalt, and others all have them), and other ways to keep our phones charged.

However, what good is a charged cell phone when there are no powered towers to talk to? Your landline will not work when the neighborhood hub has no power.

POTS line are all gone or going away. COWs are ok, but there is no way the carriers will have enough 5G ones to cover a large area like Houston, much less the whole state.

Regulations will not do any good. There were regulations in place to keep the power on during a freeze in Texas. I'm sure there were regulations in place to prevent the huge blackout in the north-east a few years back. The corporations will do what they want.

Maybe it's time to stock up on signal flares and old-fashioned hand crank air raid sirens.

A possibility might be old fashioned emergency call boxes for neighborhoods. Install them by the mail box clusters. Make them battery/solar powered and on the radio system that first responders use. Just an idea.

The "mail box clusters" are behind locked doors in the post office that's a rented space in a mall.