The holiday bombing in Nashville provided clear evidence of what we've lost in terms of PSTN resiliency. I don't think there would have been region-wide loss of service for greater than 24 hours in say 1994.

Who cares about reliability, it is not as if lives depend on it. /s

If I look at the availability of phone service in my home (German metro area, cable) it is way below anyone would gave dared to provide in the TDM/ISDN times. I strongly believe only the redundancies people have with also having a mobile phone has allowed this to continue with lives being lost and regulators clamping down.

Are there statistics, or is this personal experience?

I've never had a landline phone fail, but I also haven't had one for about 12 years.

I have had a landline phone fail--a tree fell over on the next block down and took the wires along. Also, many years ago, I was in a building where we found the phones would work without power, but they wouldn't ring. While waiting to go home, we would resort to "polling"--pick up a line and see whether anyone was on it.

Yeah, but also in an era of vastly less inter city capacity for long haul. Properly implemented Opus on a network with under 1% packet loss sounds great.

Yeah but how often are two people connected by networks that maintain <1% PL and low jitter for the entirety of a length of a call?

I'm thinking of just shipping 79xxs to my close friends and telling them to plug them directly into their routers, but even that will go to shit around 20:00 local as their residential networks overload.

The weakest link is absolutely the residential class last mile contended access networks. I've regularly seen 0.00% packet loss for weeks at a time on business class connections between two points in the continental US, but when one end is slightly flaky, all bets are off.