There have been a few threads along these lines but surely you are all missing the obvious. What happens when a car takes out a cabinet, telegraph pole or there's equipment failure in the exchange? Customers lose their service, it gets reported and then repaired.
I think that it's naive to think that phone line failures don't exist on the current system, it's very much a question of probability as to whether any failure has any consequences.
I would have expected BT and the other operators to have collated data from the power distributors to identify areas that suffer from regular outages, such as some parts of Scotland, and to then switch these last.
About 6 years ago I lost my phone and internet for 24 hours when Openreach were working on a fault on a line for a house around the corner, the engineer got into a pickle, unplugged my line and went home. I've had DV for 2.5 years and I've had one small power outage lasting a few minutes. So neither system is perfect and I could easily say that I've had a better, more reliable service with DV.
