Landlines work when there is no power, which depending on where you live can happen more or less often but an important feature for an elderly family member especially if they live alone.
For my situation, telling my mom her voip phone was a landline would be problematic.
I do need some solution though, AT&T technicians tell me copper thieves are disrupting her service regularly.
Landlines only work when there is no power if:
- you use an old school landline phone (not cordless)
- your landline is actually copper going to the house (I've seen fiber to house + conversion to twisted pair by a box with a battery)
- upstream infrastructure either still has (possibly battery) power
If the isp doesn’t go down with the power outage you could probably get a big enough ups to keep the router and voip phone going for at least a couple of hours. Those things don’t use much power
I just setup a VOIP line at home and have it plugged into my UPS (along with my cable modem + network devices) to provide call service in the event of a power outage.
In a big black out live we had in Spain the infrastructure all goes down. I was the only with data because i had star link and batteries in the house. Not that I could call anyone in Spain though.