Landlines Aren’t Making a Comeback Just Yet, but There’s One Good Reason to Reconsider Cutting Yours

The case for owning a landline in 2026 doesn’t rest on daily usefulness. Smartphones do everything a home phone does and considerably more, and the idea of installing a dedicated phone line for routine calls stopped making sense for most households years ago. The case rests on something narrower and more specific: what happens when the infrastructure your smartphone depends on fails. Major storms, earthquakes and widespread power failures are the conditions where cell networks become most unreliable, and they’re the same conditions where a traditional copper-line landline, drawing power directly from the phone line and operating on completely separate infrastructure, tends to keep working.

Outages can leave you stranded without one of your most critical lines of access to the world for hours if you’re reliant only on a cellphone. And if your smartphone can’t make phone calls, it’s not much good in an emergency.

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