Right. There are lots of places that have a modern telephony system that didn't have to go through the "string wires up and run everything through a central exchange with switching executed by human operators". Knock out the satellites and relay towers, or disrupt the supply chain for phones and their communications network goes medieval.

Same goes for countries that don't make cars of their own; used to be that in Cuba you'd see beaters from the 50's that had well over 100,000 miles on their odometers. They had no choice, after all.