> I almost never have LTE or even mobile data of any kind when I'm outside of cities (for a liberal definition of city)

I'm curious what countries /places these are. My operator doesn't even activate 3G on modern phones, I literally have nothing aside from LTE/VoLTE. Since LTE got deployed on the low frequencies reclaimed from analog TV, the reception is generally BETTER than 3G etc.

Also when there are natural disasters, the voice infrastructure is the first to collapse, but data in chat apps still makes it through