So, a little history so you understand why the landline phones don't work during a power outage. After the Paint Fire in 1990, the phone lines had burned and needed to be reinstalled. With forward thinking, the phone company at the time decided to rewire everything with fiber optic instead of copper wire. Copper wire is what carries the small electrical charge to power the phone system. Without the copper wiring, we now have to rely on a battery pack in the junction box (ours is located at Manzanita and Lookout Rd.) The batteries are dead. After nearly 7 years of fighting with Verizon, and then Frontier, they replaced the batteries, which were promptly depleted and killed during the Whittier Fire in 2017. Several months ago, after a power outage, it took 12 hours after the power was restored for the batteries to be charged enough to run the system. As we are now nearing 24 hours since the last outage.... I'm thinking the batteries are once again, officially dead.
The new Frontier internet system is independent of the phone system, but does rely on Edison to power it, so when the power goes out, so does the internet. It is restored when the power comes back on, however.
Please know, when the power goes out, and the phones go with it, there are one or two people that dedicate an hour or more of their time reporting it and complaining. There needs to be more. Please join us in letting Frontier know that this is not acceptable.
As an FYI, on W. Camino Cielo our frontier landline has worked through the full power outage. The DSL however dies as soon as power goes out. It's supposed to have battery backup, but that doesn't work. Where do you complain about this stuff, I actually find the DSL more useful than the phone?
During the first outages (we've had at least 14 power outages this year due to the pole replacement crap!) I contacted frontier customer support and they dutifully created tickets which were then summarily closed. I once managed to get a bit more help and found out that the DSL back-end infrastructure that has dead batteries is managed by some remote (national?) team and that the local team that gets our tickets can't do anything about it.
I now have a cellular router so I can seamlessly switch from DSL to cellular. Costs ~$15/mo to keep a 1GB/mo SIM card going and then I add more data during the outage if we're about to run low.