POTS; was: Anyone here from Oregon USA to help with collection pickup?

I suspect that this works only because most cellphones are not roaming at any given moment. (To those who know - can the cellphone system handle having more than a small fraction of the cellphones roaming?) I also note that this works only because each cellphone *has* a "home". Individual portable phone numbers might work if handled similarly, but it would make service for an individual's phone number dependent on a switch that the individual may not have any particular relation to at all (and, depending on how numbers are assigned, may never have had). If I lose service when the switch down the street is knocked out, I find that a lot more tolerable than if, say, I lose service whenever some switch off in Germany, which I've never lived near, dies. Of course, PSTN facilities are supposed to have five nines of uptime. Five minutes a year is probably livable, even if you square it (ten minutes a year) because two mostly unrelated hops (caller -> home switch -> current switch) are involved. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B