Ping Rickety C (latency issue)

Satelites in geosynchronous orbit, it's a lot further to any place on earth by space than it is by fibre.

There used to be geosynchronoius satellites used for phone calls too.

I used to be in the satellite voice business, long ago. There's an easily audible difference in latency between terrestrial, one-hop, and two-hop paths. Subjectively it's roughly an apparent 10 IQ points per hop. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

These days, most such links use terrestrial fiber through undersea cables. Satellites are reserved for communications that does not need to be real time. The observed delay is transit time transmission delay, but mostly video and audio compression/decompression delays. The worst is high quality video, which takes quite a bit of time to do the compression and decompression. The associated audio has to stay lip synced to the video, so it is intentionally delayed so that you don't hear the correspondent talking several seconds before you see his mouth move. Ocassionally, someone forgets this detail, and hear the voice long before the video. Any loss in IQ during this process seems to be temporary.

The usual coast-to-coast phone call seems fine to me.

It isn't satellite anymore AFAICT.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

At one point I had to do some software development using telnet from Australia to the USA... via two geosynchronous hops. A 2-second echo sure helps develop accurate typing technique. It's amazing how much work you can get done in 2 seconds without seeing any response on the screen.

I was horrified that the smart developers at Sun seemed to think that RPC was a sensible paradigm for distributed computing, instead of asynchronous messaging. Still am horrified really.

Clifford Heath

CNN, which is supposed to be professional, has poor IQ delays like that on occasion.