wasnt there a hige shit stom in australia for their new national broadband network making internet ptrimary and phone secondary, a lot of aussies on forums I frequent bitch about its reliability, where even their aged copper services worked fine, not to mention prolonged outages due to storms and the bushfires they had recently, lets hope the world learns from australias mistakes and not go down that path.
There are still a few complaints every now and again but fixed line numbers are continuing to drop off a cliff and those residential services which remain have almost all been converted to VOIP via home gateway with an FXS port. Mobile/Cell is where most people ended up. Especially since you can get unlimited calls/txt with some data for about ten bucks a month. It also helps that a number of the mobile providers include wifi-calling so mobile is a viable alternative even in weak cell coverage areas if you have internet. Yes, everyone knows about the reliability/power-failure arguments but in the latest set of bushfires whole exchanges, backhaul services and power distribution cables were destroyed so 8 hours of battery backed up POTS in a local exchange didn't help much. Mark.