An interesting shift in the nature of the dramatic problem
A few years ago, writers had to go out of their way to explain how a character in a remote location could communicate with people elsewhere.
It seems to be getting to the point where authors now have to explain why a charater can't communicate. At least if the story is set in the present.
Reminds me of how they used to indicate that a photo was 30 years old in the movies: simple, make it B&W. But go back 30 years from now, and you're still well into the era of color photography. Perhaps we'll eventually infer that an image is old because it's printed on paper, rather than displayed on a screen. Kind of ignores the ubiquity of scanners, though.