Two things: One, you can't scrape up an old-fashioned 2500 set for no-batteries-required phone use in a power outage? They do make cordless phones that will run on batteries, that's one reason why I bought my old Uniden exs9800 - the base station and answering machine section have a second NiCad battery for backup.
And two, the "It's ON!" campaign is irrelevant when the switchroom goes totally out of service due to an Act of God - that could happen to the CATV headend or switch just as easily as to the ILEC switch.
Switches do suffer catastrophic failures. I got an up close look at Sylmar CA, where they got a brutal real-world lesson in earthquake bracing ... The original home of Cable Grid, where they rolled out 4" x 4" x 1/8" Concrete Reinforcement welded wire over the top steel to save a bunch of time putting up cable rack when putting the switchroom back together.
The basic premise behind the advertising campaign is sound. Even though they can never be perfect the ILEC's generally take far more complete utility power failure precautions than the CATV Companies.
For the ILEC POTS having 99.99+% overall reliability is Mission Critical, since they are serving many users who require that uptime. Alarm systems, police, hospitals, fire department, people with medical problems, etc. But for the CATV people it's an afterthought.
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