No radio = mind-connected?

I was interviewed on KWOD blog radio the other day and a good portion of the conversation concerned the invention of the Vuduri society and the whole world-building thing. My claim then and my claim now is in the original, original version of Rome's Revolution there was no Overmind and no mind-connection. The Vuduri had the same traits they have now, colorless clothes, colorless lives, but it was just because their minds were elsewhere, not connected.

As I have stated in the past, my entire goal was to have a scene which everyone could relate to: where our hero, Rei, was on the airless moon of Dara, trudging through the crunchy surface, ready to release the VIRUS units and utterly depressed because the love of his life, Rome, was leaving and he would most likely never see her again.

Before I came up with the mind-connection which revolutionized Vuduri society, I did consider other alternatives. The first was the most trivial. The spacesuits did have radios but the one in Rei's spacesuit was broken. That seemed kind of boring and frankly artificial in that it was invented for the sole purpose of isolating him.

Another possibility was that he did have a radio in his suit but somehow it was not able to connect to Rome or the Algol for whatever reason. Not only did this seem artificial but also lame. Same thing goes for forgetting to take a radio that clips on to the suit.

Summarizing the above, we can only divide the possible versions into they had radios or they did not. Not having a radio in the first place is so wild and out there and it made the inherent drama completely organic. So given that one fact, it opened up the whole universe of the Vuduri and I think allowed for the creation of a fascinating and completely new culture.