when there is a power outage it is most likely that the cell towers are down, too

Cell phone towers and communication systems have backup power for emergency communication during power outages.

If you have backup power for your router and ONT/Modem, you should also still have internet service during a power outage. The ISP-owned ONT for a place I lived had a little lead-acid battery attached to it, and during power outages I still had internet service.

	▲	toast0 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I live somewhere with two nines of utility power reliability, I mention that to say everybody's backup (or lack thereof) is well tested. I've got UPSes on most of my computers and a standby generator that pops on after about 10 seconds. DSL from my ILEC has zero backup power; sync drops when the power drops. I don't know about the cable. Municipal fiber doesn't drop so far, but I haven't had a long outage since I got it; my ISP has a generator where they route customer packets. We get cell coverage for about 4-8 hours, depending on which network you're on and if the outage started overnight coverage usually lasts until people wake up. After that, communicating with the outside world is hard for most people. Time to make babies ... anyway it's often cold, so snuggling is likely.

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btilly 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most power outages are local, not regional. And cellphone towers will work at a surprising distance.

Therefore my experience has been that cellphones tend to remain up, even though the power is down.

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fhdkweig 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In the US, cell towers have battery backups so emergency calls can still go through. I imagine most countries do too.

	▲	ssl-3 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My experience in the US is that when the power drops, the cell networks immediately become mostly useless. I've theorize that they become overburdened by the pocket supercomputers that automatically start using it instead of local wifi.