That's not what he said. His statement was - "the instruments through which we shall be able to do [t]his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone".
I suspect he envisioned a system akin to his idea of power transmission to everybody with no moving parts, just a bunch of antennae put up to catch electricity from the air.
Your analysis is in a vacuum IMO....taking the literal statement but NOT putting it in context of everything else he nailed! Context matters. We’ll never know....but I am confident I got this....