> Some wireless carriers have urged consumers to "cut the cord" on
> landline phones and rely entirely on a cellular phone. Some experts said
> that cell phone infrastructures are not built to be redundant, the way
> landline phone networks are.
Yes, But. It is absoluteley true that the landline grid worked admirably without any stoppage at all afaict. Except that it was also almost completely useless, and thus got very little traffic, for the simple reason that most of us today own phones with so many features that they have to plugged in -- and thus when the power is out, they're dead. And even if you had an old AT&T battle tank model, which would work, it wouldn't have done you any good, because the landline phones of everyone you'd want to call would be dead.
So in the end, with all their flaws, you had pretty good chance of contacting someone who owned a cell phone and just about none at all contacting someone who didn't.
(Landline grids, BTW, also freeze up when too many people try to call at once and find out if their friends are okay. I've experienced that several times.)
Jordan however had what struck me as a very good suggestion: that people should get little UPS's for their phones. UPS's are Uninterrupted Power Supplies, surge protectors that store power in case of an emergency. Personally I'm writing it down on my Christmas list to get one and attach it to the phones of all the people I tried to contact. Part of me says this is locking the barn door after the horse is gone. But given what we've all learned in the last week about this crappy grid, it doesn't seem that improbable that it could happen again soon.
Michael