Yep. Very good advice.

Text messages will work where there is very intermittent service and extremely poor signal levels - too poor to support a voice call - in many cases. It will also go through where the switch is swamped and cannot set up a voice channel for a call ("all circuits are busy now" situations.)

However - be advised that Cingular service down here is totally screwed. A friend of mine with Cing service here can call out, but calls to their phone return "due to hurricane Katrina, we cannot complete your call at this time." This in Niceville, which never lost power, never saw hurricane-force winds, and where outbound calls from that same phone work just fine. Cingular has been spotty since last night with calls just "disappearing" to being routed to voicemail, even with the storm half a day away.

My cell service on T-Mobile has been rock solid - I've had the usual folks calling to see if we're ok, etc - nobody has said anything about having trouble getting through (our landline service is likewise working fine.)

In the high-impact areas towers are probably down (literally) and thus no service is available. Some carriers will open roaming (no charge) on anything that can get a signal during these events - T-Mobile did after Ivan, and left it open until they had their network back to normal. This DOES cost them money though, and not all carriers will do it for that reason.... Also, technology differences mean that interoperability between carriers depends on a common technology (TDMA .vs. CDMA .vs. GSM) But - all this depends on there being an antenna that is still standing, a transmitter that isn't under 20' of water, and a source of electricity to run it. Most of these sites have backup generators - but not all - however, if innudated with water they will still short out.