There's plenty of alternatives to amateur bands for backup communications. ZigBee and LoRA networks/repeaters, amateur WiFi in ISM, Starlink, GSM radios, modems over POTS lines, etc. Ham really is a solution looking for a problem. I was very interested in Ham and in college spent some time in the Ham club but even then, before LTE everywhere and smartphones, it was obvious that GSM could eat Ham's lunch. These days with smartphones I don't even bother. I have a GMRS setup I keep at home to tackle some dead spots in our area or to talk to my partner when I'm working in the garage (and as a backup in case of power outages), which works good enough for our purposes.
Ham these days really is a solution looking for a problem. Probably its biggest advantage these days is how easy it is to get cheap, used ham equipment compared to some of the alternatives.
> There's plenty of alternatives to amateur bands for backup communications. ZigBee and LoRA networks/repeaters, amateur WiFi in ISM, Starlink, GSM radios, modems over POTS lines, etc.
In an actualy emergency, there really isn't an alternative. Ham is remarkable in that you can communicate around the world from a 100% self-contained system. You and the other party just need your own equipment and power (generator, etc) and there is no dependency on anything else. Every other solution has multiple (sometimes dozens if not hundreds) of third parties in the dependency chain, if any one of them is down, there's no communication channel.
It doesn't take too much for such emergencies to happen. Hurricane Maria in 2017 knocked out essentially all communications in Puerto Rico for a long time (many months in more remote unreachable areas, a week or more even in the city).
Satellite phones work, if you have one and an active plan. But that's so expensive approximately nobody does. Ham though, works standalone, free.
Ham these days really is a solution looking for a problem. Probably its biggest advantage these days is how easy it is to get cheap, used ham equipment compared to some of the alternatives.