It's much harder to trace a land line then calls made on cell phones. One transmits info via satellited and the other via land line. Hence when you key in your S.S # or your credit card info, it can be intercepted. Where as the only way to intercept your land line call is by placing a trace on it. Which i hope still requires a court order (lol)

And if there is one thing I learned about technology, is the more advanced it gets the more glitches it may have that would need to be ironed out. And as much as i love new gadgets, I believe the land line would be like a beautiful grandfather clock. It's just grand to have it and really easy to rely on. Cuz you know it's a tried and true secure and never failing (well 99.9%) feature.

Oh and Lasha, during an outage the best communication is the SOS System lol, word of mouth, postal services, birds delivered messages, and what ever other clever things one can think of.

Have you ever notices that imagination sparks during a jam, or a tight situation that needs quick a quick fix. I find that always fascinating.

The case with the power outages is very important, but I guess with my experience living in New York nearly all my life has resulted in my thinking different. We rarely get outages, and when we do, it's usually restored pretty quickly. Of course, it may be a completely different case in other regions of New York and in other states, but surely, as technology advances, outages will hopefully be less of an issue - and in Australia too!

Does anybody else have experience with outages and methods of communication?

I use VoIP (voice over IP) as my primary phone connection, my ADSL modem has VoIP capability and I just connect my regular landline to that. My modem combines my VoIP and traditional landline into 1 phone handset.

VoIP's advantage for me is that I pay A$15 a month and all of my national calls are covered, OR I can pay A$20 and have all my national and international calls (to 8 countries) covered.

Business needs the call quality of landlines, especially for faxing (a dying form of communication).

Another thing going for traditional landlines is that in an emergency they still work (provided the phone isn't cordless). Mobiles need to be charged and VoIP needs an active internet connection. This time last year we had some massive storms and had no power for a week, the only thing that worked during that time was our antique landline and non cordless phone.

I do agree with you though, traditional landlines will die eventually, faxes will be replaced by PDF's and email, voice phones will either be VoIP or mobiles, and our communication costs will go right down.