> If there's a pause in speech that reaches a culturally- and situationally-defined length of time

That's kind of my point! Talking over a weak connection is a situation which warrants making that "length of time" longer. My argument is that doing so is not a big deal, not hard to learn, and quite a practical (if temporary, hopefully) solution to problems with the transmission during calls.

> Conversation is a fluent flow. It isn't always quick, but it's often constant. There's a rhythm. Break the rhythm, and you're breaking the expectations of your conversational partner.

Yes, that's all true, but I don't want to break the flow, just slow it down a little. If we both know that we're talking over an unreliable connection, is it really that hard to adjust and give your partner additional few seconds in cases where you suspect they not finished yet?

> Do you actually get offended if someone interrupts you without meaning to?

I'm not sure. As I said, I don't have much experience with this kind of situations. But I think that, if I said (when joining the conversation) that "I use a rather bad connection right now and I'd like to ask you guys to take that into account if I happen to fall silent for a second, sorry for the inconvenience" and still got interrupted many times in a row, then I guess yes, I'd feel somewhat offended (that may not be the best word for it, though, but I'd feel rather uncomfortable).

My reasoning is that we're all adults, we know that the technology we use is imperfect but decide to use it anyway, so we should learn to mitigate the problems with it. They may get solved one day, maybe even soon, but, in the meantime, we can make the experience much better by ourselves. (Now I'm seriously considering if that kind of mentality seems natural to me because of being brought up in a country behind an Iron Curtain, where nearly everything by default was crap and you needed a lot of creativity and skill to make these damn things even usable. Interesting thought.)

> Usually being the one at a loss for words myself, my answer is "yes". If you don't make some signal that you're working on formulating a response

Yes, but that's assuming nearly perfect connection at all times. But we know we're using something that can be rather shitty at times, so we should just adjust accordingly. Or rather, I have a hard time understanding why wouldn't you want to do just that. Isn't it frustrating to get interrupted (even if only by mistake) constantly?

Anyway, returning to the beginning, the various "parameters" of a spoken discussion, like how long you wait for your partner to start responding, how long you wait to ascertain they're done speaking, how loud you need to speak (or how closely you need to listen on the other side), what kinds of interruptions are expected, and so on are there to be tweaked depending on circumstances.

I just now realized that in principle we could be in agreement, but differ in how far we're willing to tweak these parameters just to talk comfortably. I'm obviously inclined to accept even relatively rigid rules of conversation (the worse the connection, the more of a protocol I would be ok with), but I realize it may be just my personal preference. Well, food for thought me anyway, so thanks :)