A small USB pluggable module that supports LoRa plus an app using Codec2 or similar low rate codec for voice encoding could fill the gap, although having it bundled with the phone would make it a lot less cumbersome to use. For non phone portable solutions, the LilyGo T-Deck Plus/Pro come to mind, but they're not phones so that would imply a 2nd device to carry around.
But needs towers, which in some disaster situations could be not working, or in others simply not trustworthy. If 5G phones radio modules were modified to allow point to point communication, the usable range would still be a small fraction of what is attainable with towers and their high gain antenna arrays.
The issue with this is that the entire architecture trades energy consumption on the eNodeB side for the handset side. One could make a cell phone where one handset was the eNB and one the handset (and, contrary to the parent post’s claim, there would be no issue getting this approved in an ISM band), but the one operating in eNB mode would have atrocious battery life.
It also helps a lot to have one side of the transmission up on a tower with a giant high gain antenna :)
