I'm 10m from the wifi, which is 1m from the router, which is 50m from the fiber-to-DSL neighborhood router, the Fiber to DLS shared with exactly 2 other homes.
I've just not had a single lag-related problem with VTT since I shifted to Fiber, except one short period where the Net was being generally problematic.
It's been my consistent experience in every remote game I've ever run save one - and that was with 1 player over VOIP in a game system we both were quite familiar with.
Your experiences are what they are. I can only repeat they're pretty foreign to my own. Other than the talking-across problem I've not seen the faintest sign of delay that didn't already happen when we were playing face-to-face. Some things are faster (though some of that may come from using dice macros instead of people fumbling around with and reading physical dice).
And this goes back to running remote over speakerphone in the 80's. Yes, I did have a few remote sessions even then.
Further, I'm not a terribly fast-running GM to begin with, so it's VERY much more apparent. I've also run the same adventure for both the remote and local groups in the same weeks... Specifically, for Sentinel Comics (SCRPG) and for Alien. In both cases, the remote group took longer for every scene. Both of these were run with a ship map, but TOTM zone based combat, and usually only one zone involved in SCRPG.
Unless this is the same group, this doesn't tell me much; I could run the same game for two different groups and I'd expect one of them to be potentially significantly slower for reasons having nothing to do with being online or not.
A 3 hour FTF takes my remote group 3.5 to 4hours. It's been consistently so since the 80s, with various groups. So, either it's me, or it's the medium, and given the exception... my wife has complained about it with groups I'm not involved in, that she's played with FTF and remotely.
Again, I'm not negating your experience, but I have to say that's very much not been my experience, so...
I suspect most simply are not aware of the relative timing as much; teaching and being a musician both have forced me to be very time aware over short durations. My wife was a broadcast technician/master control operator, needing fractional second accuracy of actions and discrepancies above 2 sec being things requiring paperwork... We both have been.
We have some fairly hard time breaks we have to follow, so I think I'd be quite aware of a significant difference in time taken.
For comparison:
Local sketch map: 2-3 sec to grab the marker, 10-15 to grab the blank side. 10-15 to draw the sketch.
I'd take significantly longer to get a useable sketch in those situations; I'd say at least a minute to two minimum, and that would be with a relatively small or simple map.
Foundary (remoted into the server): 2-3 sec to trigger the menu item to select new map, 1-2 sec per map for the thumbnails to show (10 in the ALIEN adventure run), 10 - 60, size dependent,for the map to show on my end, 10-60 to get the fog, and 10-60 for the players to then see it. Plus, while loading for them, 3-10 sec per token to put it on the map.
At my end with Maptool, loading the map takes so little time I might as well be changing screens. At the player end it varies considerably, but going into the difference would go down the rabbithole of addressing how Maptool manages assets. Some maps load virtually instantly for most of the group, some can take as long as a few minutes. The ones that do the latter are things if I had to do it by hand at the time would likely take me 20 minutes or more to draw (they're normally ones that have been custom-assembled from tiles or geomorphs).
Given that the adventure in question is a hexless hexcrawl, I couldn't preset scenes because I couldn't predict where they were going to be.
I'll give you that snadboxes would probably complicate my timing in this seriously, but then, they'd likely do that face to face too.
Local play getting the map: different alien adventure... grab meeples off the current map: someone else's 5 sec, while I take 5 to 30 sec to get the new one on table, I then take 5 sec to point to where the meeples go, and they put them on.
Now, counterpoint - running TFT. Map? 20 sec to wipe. setup? if I have the counters, 5-10 sec. If I don't, up to 60 sec to find them. This is part of why I switched to abstract cubes instead of counters or minis. Reduces setup time by reducing needed search.
I can't see even simple numbered counters don't take some search-and-setup when I used them back in the day. With very small number of opponents it might be trivial.
