[bskrobisz]

At the risk of being oblivious to humor:

The point is the latency and loss of the message -- for a more red-team angle, suppose someone in the intervening space has captured the communicator and seized their phone?

The story is an allegory (metaphor?) for the inherent unreliability of communications between any given pieces of real-world infrastructure and the problems that arise when that unreliability reaches critical thresholds.