Do you want air traffic control to be on the general internet?
That seems like an extremely foolhardy thing to do.
That seems like an extremely foolhardy thing to do.
It seems like it would present a less-chaotic solution than that provided by having no data communications at all.
I'm rather certain the FAA does indeed either employ or contract people that are capable of providing the solution. I'm also quite certain those people live in a perpetual blizzard of responsibility diffusion bullshit: the FAA is a venerable and highly risk-adverse operation. If someone told me it takes months of meetings and sign-offs to so much as log into a router and perform a benign check of some setting, I wouldn't blink.
In this case, that outsourcing could easily look like "call local ISP's, get connections, set up tunnel".
One of the more popular means of diffusing responsibility. A mere symptom, in other words. Not a cause. There is a abundance of qualified contractors in our world that could provide a functioning fail-over solution using whatever medium one might imagine. Somehow, this does not happen. The problem is elsewhere.