I'm pretty sure that technically it is in-fact news. Obviously not the kind that everyone is interested in.

In any case CmdrTaco posted this particular FA, I would suspect he would know what does and doesn't belong on /.

I have 2 phones plugged in that work fine with no power, including the one on my night stand, I also have another one in a drawer I can use if needed.

The batteries at the CO will last longer than my UPS
The generator at the CO will last longer than my generator
The power company will put a higher priority on restoring power to the CO than they will to my house or my ISP for that matter.

As I mentioned previously, the ability to have a more reliable access to 911 is not the only reason we have a land line. We use it for our local calls which don't cost us anything extra.

It's simply ridiculous to claim that a land line is no more reliable than VoIP, in the last 2 major earthquakes we have seen (94 and 71) power was out for more than a day but the land line never stopped working, after the initial flood of calls following the quakes the phones worked fine for contacting & communicating with friends & family.

If I switched to a VoIP provider I could save a few bucks but I've introduced several more potential points of failure into the scenario, even if I have a spare DSL modem and router (which I do) they won't run more than a few hours on a consumer-grade UPS, I suppose I could buy a $1000 higher end UPS to run me for longer but that's going to create it's own problems and increase my power costs.

Far from the only reason, but the reliability of a land line is nothing to discount. We use our land line primarily for local calls, it provides better call quality and allows us to cost effectively place phones in every room of the house where we might be.

If we ditched our land line we would need to upgrade our cell plan to one with more minutes so much if not all of the savings of cutting the land line is going to disappear.

Perhaps it's just a small part of my plan, I've got a small generator, stored water + non-perishable food, not to mention camping gear, even if I don't need to call 911 it might be helpful to reach out to loved ones.

You might or I might be fine, but I was talking specifically about elderly people without a lot of stamina, especially problematic for a widow who's never had to worry about how to deal with the cold in her entire lifetime.

In general, many people have become soft thanks to modern life.

Called it ;)

Seriously, 10,000 911 calls is a huge number, even if 911 is being abused there were no doubt a lot of calls from people trapped in their homes (for people who have ditched their landlines) or cars. Imagine an elderly person in their home when the heat goes out, in those cold temperatures that can become life threatening very quickly.

Things like this are one of the main reasons we pay ~$25/mo for a land line despite having 5 active cell phones in the house on 2 separate networks (not to mention a few inactive ones that can still call 911) I know that if the excrement hits the air circulator that I will have more options to reach people than finicky mobile networks.