eli5: In a world of instant communication via satellite, why does news anchors connecting with field reporters live still involve a 3 second silent pause?
In: Physics
It really depends on the system that is being used. Essentially it is the mercy of the networks. Satellite can have 250ms or more of latency, local radio broadcast can be much quicker (depending on the technology) and even wired copper/fiber can have some latency associated with it. To add, nowadays everything is digital (which adds DSP encoding and decoding latencies to it all).
Long story short…just because we call it instant…doesn’t mean physics allows for “instant”.
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