From USA Today:
Families: Cellphones of missing passengers still ring
Before reading further, I put my cellphone in airplane mode (i.e., not communicating with the network) and called it from the land-line. Straight to voicemail, same as if it'd been busy.
Presumably, other networks might handle it differently, especially for long-distance calls. So, a call to an unreachable cellphone might "ring" for a while before the network gives up. And, of course, voicemail will continue to work just fine.
The article does go on to quote experts who point this out.
It's not quite the same as old-style land lines, which will happily continue to ring as long as you'll wait, even if the phone and the house containing it have been whisked away to the land of Kansas. In this case, (a) the network will never detect the unreachability of the phone, and (b) the home answering machine, having likewise been whisked away, will never pick up.
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