The Question and Answer Board

[BullNBear52]

you can use an older princess or desk phone and still call out. The land line phone still operates but won't light up or maybe not even ring. But you'll be able to call in an emergency.

I still have my landline and a Princess phone connected to it. The low voltage is supplied by the phone company and comes into the house via twisted pair so the dial will still light up and the phone ring in a power outage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twisted_pair

The beauty of twisted pair was it was 4 wires with 2 each twisted together. You only needed one pair for a phone and the other pair was built in redundancy.

The only reason I maintained the landline was so our grandparents could get in touch with us in an emergency if power went out and the cell towers went down.

Back in the 1980s I worked for bank on the ATM side. Because of the breakup of AT&T it was a constant battle trouble shooting a down ATM since it crossed various companies and internal systems. This was before fiber optic and wifi and you'd walk into a computer room lift a panel in the floor to see a mass of wires. No one ever troubleshooted a line. They just ran another cable.

When my phone company (grandfathered under the AT&T breakup) offered fiber optic I signed up immediately. When they came out I made it easy for them. Pull the coaxial cable and use it to run the Ethernet lines for TV and the wifi router.