Yeah, I'll freely admit I'm a curmudgeon with respect to technology "upgrades", but we've really lost a lot of solid reliability in our phone systems (landlines at least)
Now it feels like an afterthought compared to all of the redundancies they had put in place back then.
I experienced local POTS phone lines for something like my first 35 years.
Bad ice storms? Weeks-long power outages? Whatever; POTS didn't care.
The only time I ever picked up a real telephone at home and didn't get a dialtone, I wandered out to investigate and saw the wire for the house just laying there in the alley -- apparently, it'd been hooked by a passing truck.
They (The Phone Company) had it fixed within one hour after we let them know.
(An hour of downtime over 35 years. How many nines is that?)
Now it feels like an afterthought compared to all of the redundancies they had put in place back then.