Go outside and look at the wires near your house. The top wires carry the power. As you go down you will see smaller wires. Depending on where you live there may be different sets but the lower wires are your phone, fiber optic lines, cable, etc.
A lot of times you can lose power as a tree limb that touches the wires and pulls on it and they are set to trip the after 2-3 surges. The lower lines stay connected so if you power your house up with a generator, everything else is good to go. It's only when the poles snap or wires actually short/arc that you lose cable/telephone/optic lines.
You ever notice how it's fairly rare for you low voltage land-line telephone to go out? It's partly do to system design (I'm sure there's tons of places to read about on the web about why it works so good and why it's been hard for companies to get rid of it) and because the wires are lower on the poles and get protection from up above.
My recommendation is to save the money on a UPS for the home and get a generator with electronic grade filtering. The different generator companies call them different names according to their trademarks but you'll see it in the specs for distortion. Most have started putting this on the output of their generators as a selling point once you get above the $500-600 cheapies. I have a contractor grade Generac generator and it's a pretty clean signal.
If you REALLY need a UPS system for your electronics, odds are you are tecnically inclined enough to not need advice from an internet forum on why you need it (like critical servers). A UPS for a single laptop/desktop is silly if you ask me and I'm one of those people who typically waste money on gadgets.
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