content: AT&T did the same. They fired virtually everyone that ever worked on the American telecom infrastructure whose job it was to make sure it worked in the event of a war or other catastrophe. For about 10 years there in the early to mid 90s to mid 2000s if the shit really hit the fan not only would the phone networks not work but military communication would have gone down as well which is why satellite communication technology really kicked off. Its only recently started to be genuinely upgraded because fixing all the cable splices that went undocumented and unmapped cables is too expensive (also copper is worth recycling today, it was cheap in the 90s) so fiber backbones are starting to be laid down.    There are still situations were major cities in the US don't have independent connections to telecoms backbones and are patched into another cities telecom backbone. Most of South Dakota for example is connected to Minnesota with no real major telecom backbone lines going north or west. If something were to happen to Minneapolis then most of South Dakota would go offline and be extremely difficult to send communications into or out of that area. I think the southern half of Alabama would have similar issues if Mississippi went dark.