Light years away? No working cell phones in Hawaii disaster area (with wired service destroyed) per CNN. Redundancy? Do I have to give the same answer again. How long do you think after a large disaster that takes out phone lines and the cell system before "the phone company" shows up to provide comms at a shelter at a public school? Hams, in areas where ready, can provide comms at locations where there were not even comms (often bring their own generators.) (Oh, and by the way, in a hurricane, the generator at the nearby shelter school, would not start despite being checked a week earlier.) In real disasters, nothing that phone companies have done is going to be sufficient (at that point read my second sentence again). Consider also the Puerto Rico hurricane just a few years agi...ham radio teams went there to provide comms well after the incident. In real large disasters, "40 billion dollars" does not mean quick comms as needed and where needed. If a couple cell towers and wirelines go out, how long do you think it will take the phone company to fix that? And how long do you think it would talk a local ham radio group when organized, to provided back up comms between critical locations? (By the way, both hospitals in our area have amateur stations as well as the county emergency operating center (and it has HF). Amateurs also ride in SO cars during regular drills for the nearby nuclear plant. It the county system goes down, the cell system would likely be already overloaded, and the ham in the car is his backup to the EOC.
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