It can go either way.
In November of 2014, when a band of lake effect snow dropped 70+ inches or so in a 4 day span in the Western NY area, satellite dishes did not fair well, especially roof mounted ones. The overnight snow was so heavy and intense it caused both of my DirecTV dishes and my old not in use Dish Network dishes to essentially collapse from their weight of the snow. There was no brushing this snow off, even if you could get outside (try walking though 3 feet of snow after day 1), with the near zero visibility you couldn't even see the dishes and with the weight, there no way you could bush any amount of snow off. Best case would be to knock a chunk off that would just fall on you anyway. It took a week to get a DirecTV tech out to re-aim them, and when the tech was here he said that about the only jobs he's had since the driving bans were lifted were re-aiming dishes.
I did also however lose my cable connection, but it was pretty much just me. While I don't have any immediate neighbors (God Bless rural living!), the houses close to me that have cable did not loose it. Why was I lucky? My cable line comes off from the tap and then is secured down the utility pole that sits in a ditch. After a few days, when viability was finally decent enough that the snow plows could safely go out, when one came by, the weight of the snow being thrown off the road into the ditch tore the cable line in two. I called my friend who is a manager at Time Warner, now Charter and the next day he had a crew out here to do what they could to get me back up and running, and then came back the following week when the snow was all melted to do the job right.
I'm about as backed up as I can be. TV, Internet and Phone from Charter, with TV and Internet from DirecTV and HughesNet. The cable and satellite modems are on two separate APC 1500 Pro UPS units, along with my router, wireless access point, smart switch and NAS. Cell phones are unless in my neck of the woods. I used to have Sprint, and had a mobile hotspot with them, while I had no service in most of the house, if I went outside or placed it in a north facing window with I would get a small sliver of LTE, enough to get by. A few months ago I switched to T-Mobile which has no service for a few miles in away direction from me. The only way I can use voice at home with T-Mobile is wifi calling and texting, both of which are flaky, not reliable and suck. It's barley usable when I'm on Spectrum, and not usable at all on HughesNet. Getting a T-Mobile femtocell would do no good in the event of a cable outage, a repeater is out of the question, since there's no signal to repeat. I'm either going to go back to Sprint, or look at HughesNet Voice. Since as of right now, if cable goes out, I have no phone service period.
