As I've gotten older I've started to separate process driven organizations from progress driven organizations. Process driven ones tend to be very boring, and it can be abused, but good processes trump progress to me everyday.
Then consumers don't want to pay for it and action ceases. You can play those odds for quite a while.
I forgot where I read it, but there was a story/quote/interview about how politicians can never run on maintenance because maintenance isn't sexy, they need to run on big projects.
How would a telecom outage impact two-way radios?
This is why things like ARES (Amateur Radio Emergency Service) is important for disasters where centralized systems aren't working but long range, simplex (decentralized) nets can still operate.
When I worked at the Telco that serves all of Northern Canada - the telco that has the largest operating area of any telco in the world, in fact - we had an outage that took out everything for between 1 and 3 days.
When I say everything, I mean if you picked up your phone you didn't get a dial tone. Or cell phone. Or internet. Even people that still have 2-way radios to use as phones were out of luck.
There is no other provider for every single one of those customers, so not a single person had a single shred of connectivity.
In the larger cities they posted Police and EMT Personnel on street corners in case people needed 911.
That was a rather big outage, caused by a backup generator not starting during a power outage. We were still trying to bring systems back online a week later that had never been shutdown in 20+ years.