To be fair to POTS, it at least made up for frequency response with near zero latency. What you describe is worst of both worlds -- latency of commodity packet

To be fair to POTS, it at least made up for frequency response with near zero latency. What you describe is worst of both worlds -- latency of commodity packet switching plus bandwidth of POTS. Personally, I'd always choose zero latency over audio fidelity in a two-way communication medium.