Time travel? Or, just clever technology

Summary

It sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? We promise perfect synchronization, frame and sample accuracy, low-latency realtime conferencing, and remote recording and review, but how on earth is that possible? We have, multiple times, recorded "jams" between musicians in Canada and Germany; doesn't that break the laws of physics? Well, no. The trick is, we don't do all of those things at the same time, and we use very different approaches for each task depending on what the requirements are. But together, it just seems magic. This is the fundamental compromise that makes our system work, trading off latency, fidelity, and data transfer speed to seamlessly move audio and film over the Internet. But first, the tyranny of light speed Our Universe has one very inconvenient problem: it has an unbreakable speed limit. While it may seem instant, light takes quite a while to get around, traveling at just under 300,000 KM per second. For example, it takes about 8.4 minutes for light to reach us here on Earth from the Sun. And if you have the misfortune of reading this from Mars, it's as high as 13 minutes. In the worst case scenario, a round trip ping between Earth and Mars at light speed could be over 30 minutes! This seems largely irrelevant for people that still live on planet Earth, but it does effect us too. While the speed of light is quick in a vacuum, it's much lower in optical fibre, by between 30 and 50 per cent. And this difference is exploited in the real world, there are several radio relay systems for facilitating high frequency trading in commodities markets faster than trans-continental or trans-atlantic cables. In absolutely ideal circumstances, the latency between New York and Paris is about 20 milliseconds (ms), but once fibre optic cables are involved that increases to about 27 ms. But it gets worse, because the Internet is imperfect. The router problem If data transfer was as simple as moving blobs around at light speed, our lives would be a lot easier, b...