///Anybody know if phone companies have their own backup power? ///

Yes we do. Sort of.

Commercial AC coming in is rectified to 52.08VDC. The voltage is "stored" in the central office in battery strings of 24 cells. The number of strings varies by the size of the office. In the event of a commercial power failure backup generators automatically kick in. All of our offices with in house generators have a minimum of 72 hours worth of deisel on site. The batteries hold the office during the cutover and, in the event the generator fails, can hold the office for about 8 hours.

This is true for just about all offices in the cities. When you start getting into smaller, rural areas it's a different story. We have one trailer mounted generator that supports 7 "remote" offices scattered over 3 counties. Obviously someone's phones are going down unless we could come up with more power. In a typical situation (not the last few days) Edison has the power back on before we even get on site with a generator.

Ed