Cell networks, broadcast, satellite, and shortwave are different systems that happen to be available together when times are good. They fail for different reasons, and they fail on different clocks. An army that has had to pass an order without one of them already treats a second path as ordinary planning. A household usually meets the idea for the first time in the dark.

A strike on the power system takes cell sites when their batteries empty. A separate campaign can jam or destroy the satellites and microwave hops that were supposed to be the backup. High-frequency radio, the old fallback, is itself hostage to space weather and to whether the set was stored in a shield.

The layers do not fall in a fixed order. A jam can quiet a radio while the cell network is still up. A power cut can empty the cell sites while a shortwave set in another room still hears something. Knowing which layer you still have is the whole use of the list. Deciding that every layer has ended is how people throw away the path that survived.

Microwave hops are the links that stitch parts of the network together between towers. They are not a service a household subscribes to. Losing them is not the same event as a dead handset, and it is not a small one. Satellite paths have the same shape: they were supposed to be the way around a broken ground network, until a separate campaign made them a target too.

Broadcast is the layer that does not need the listener to answer. A station that still has power can reach a battery radio after the two-way networks have gone. That is why the household object is a radio and not an account. The radio fails if it was never bought, or if its batteries were a plan for some later week.

CISA groups communications with energy as sectors an electromagnetic or geomagnetic incident would hit together. In a war those are chosen targets, not collateral.

The household version remains a battery radio and a written meetup. Anything that requires a login is a fair-weather plan.