What defines must have?

If your home is on fire and you only have time to get out a door, then a POTS will not help especially if it is stored away in a box. This can apply to many other similar type situations such as your home being flattened by a tornado, earthquake. Home wiring and POTS damaged by a flood etc. I don't think all those people in Australia have had much use of their POTS lately. After the height of the floods, there was a news article on one of the Aussie news sites where Telcos were moving in and setting up emergency cell networks due to all the POTS damage that will take months to repair.

I heard you can still call 911 even if your home phone is not "connected" / active anymore... anyone know if this is true ?

I think your thinking of cell phones. When you turn off a land line the line goes dead, no dial tone, no power, no way to call

I do. Seeing as that dial-up is pretty much the only cost-effective way to get online in my location I keep POTs.

Just as a point of reference it also means that my willingness to view videos is quite limited. Downloading a single video, or a gallery or large pictures, takes forever and pretty much lunches my bandwidth.

The US really needs a universal service fee to bring broadband to everyone.

Why is that? If you live too far outside of town to get broadband thats the compromise you made when you chose to live where you did, no one else else needs to pay to give you a service you choose to live without.

What kind of Internet, and backup power, do you have that you have service when the power is out?

I have cable Internet, and UPS, but that won't keep Internet up very long.

This is false. Without a dial tone there will be no 911 service.

We have two active cellphones, a couple of inactive cellphones with chargers (unlike landline phones, a cellphone without an active account can still be used for 911), VOIP, and a HAM radio HT. I can power my Internet gateway via an inverter if I need to.

It's not impossible for landline service to stay up while cellphone and Internet service are down, but in my neck of the woods cellphones have been essentially 100% reliable, Internet roughly 99.9% reliable, and landline phones about 95% reliable.

I'd guess that at least half of my neighbors have landline phones, if that's the only way to summon help.

I'm realizing replies to the original post depend upon location. Overall, I consider my cell phone to be more reliable than VOIP and POTS, and I feel like VOIP is slighly more reliable than POTS. That's my feeling based on experience with all three where I live.

An emergency that is localized to my home is likely to be more pressing than an emergency that is region-wide. I figure the localized emergency will be something like a fire, home invasion or heart attack. The cell towers are likely to be operational if the emergency is just mine, and my cell phone is more likely to be near me. In contrast, a regional emergency will likely be of the type where I have time to compare notes with neighbors. I figure I'll usually have time to engineer a communication means or just make do without one. Bottom line, I plan ahead for the localized emergency, and I can improvise for the regional emergency if need be.



Comcast, Vonage and UPS

My VOIP has stayed up and running flawlessly through about 5 power outages over the last 5 years. One power outage lasted for about 5 hours. The UPS is dedicated to the routers and phone. Again, reliability depends on where you live.