Seems there is a more mundane explanation.

Latency can get below 5 ms under good radio conditions. LTE as well as older standards (W-CDMA etc) has retransmission on top of error correction. LTE uses a rather cool retransmission strategy. Search HARQ. Retransmissions can of course ruin ping times, but even this has been improved in LTE since decisions are being made closer to the antenna in the E-NodeB.

What kind of connection, firewalling and shaping the operator has to the internet is then another matter...

Yet TFA provided examples of 3G disruptions.

I for one can easily imagine scenarios where our mobile networks are heavily degraded due to viruses on phones and maybe even due to subtle DoS attacks between operators! I know there are products where operators actually may drain (very little) of its own customer's battery time to make measurements on its competitors' coverage. It's a war out there. Possibly the radio networks have to be governmentally run in the long run.

I have no idea how hardened the signaling in RRC etc in 3G/LTE is against DoS attacks. Maybe very little energy is needed to fake paging, disrupt calls, degrade bit-rates etc. Don't dismiss the wires yet!

Well, in a centralized VCS it's probably easier to automate the backup. If you also deploy centralized checkout areas like e g ClearCase dynamic views you get continuous integration.