I don't know about those theories. I suspect something else. Do you remember landlines, and how responsive they were? You would say things back and fourth and the conversation just worked, even on three-way and conference calls? There was very little noticeable lag! Even in the early cellphone days, I'd often prefer using my landline. There was less lag. Cellphones felt like speakerphones where it tries to do that ca…
Landlines were so fast and so "direct" in their latency (where distance correlates very directly with time, due to a lack of "hops") that local phone calls were faster than the speed of sound across a table, and for a bit after they came out--before people generally got used to seemingly random latency--local calls felt "intimate", like as if you were talking to someone in bed with their head right next to you; I als…
I have equally clear memories of my first overseas calls carried by undersea fiber because the lack of latency was so pronounced compared to what I had become accustomed to by then.
I still can barely tolerate carrying on a conversation on a cell phone though. The latency and compression artifacts are just horrible compared to a landline. VOIP has gotten pretty good though. I can't tell the difference between a good VOIP landline and a POTS line.