I want an iPhone! and AppleTV!

[Alex]

Originally Posted by Kevy Baby

Ya beat me to it.

Additionally, the land-line systems have generator backups as well.

Again, not infallible; just more reliable.

My perception (and it is just that, I have no quantitative evidence) is that localized phone outages are more common than regional power outages.

I've been through a few reasonably large scale blackouts since moving to the Bay Area (including one that took out about 50% of San Francisco for most of a day) and never lost the ability to reach a cell tower with my phone. Before giving up our landline over the years we had several brief outages of phone service in our neighborhood. Many cell sites also have their own backup power supplies (not eternal but then neither are the backup power supplies that the phone compnay would be using as well).