How do they do this? What about latency?
I think it’s fake, or Skype reserved a glass fibre connection between all 3 cities to provide the bandwidth and low latency. But judging by the stuttering video stream it’s fake.
It is an AD and if done for real, speed provisions had to have been made in order to facilitate doing it where a normal home connection would suffer.
The concept is heady. A year ago or so Zenda and I did a jam from london to milwaukee and back. Don’t remember the details, but in some way we figured the latency time, more by feel as I remember. Glyn on guitar and moi on drums, we took turns counting the latency and the other guys four bar or some such thing, in a call and answer type thing. It went on for a good ten minutes, with us both whalin’ our hearts out till we brought down skype…well at least most of this is true. I am bummed to hear they can’t really do this yet…
The technology’s close, but its the bandwidth that’s not there, because the people controlling it cant stop overcharging us for it. Consumer internet service is rarely synchronous, your download speed is 10 times your upload speed, so no chance of a balanced experience.
Thanks for the info Robin. By the way, spring was setting in nicely down here when all of a sudden, a cold wind came blowing in from up your way and set us back. Is the ice off the pond in your neck of the woods yet?
Iggy Pop and 9 local indie musicians were part of a local Internet Service Providers ad campaign down this way a few years back. Performing “Passenger” they too gave the (false) impression it was possible…
Please correct me if my math is wrong, but the minimum delay for any signal traveling from London to New York would have to be 16 milliseconds (at the speed of light, which is impossible to beat). So going back and forth from NY to London the return signal would take 32 milliseconds, that’s quite a delay to play in time.
And never mind the third location.
Oh, and I forgot: Skype or any part of the internet doesn’t quite work at the speed of light (yet).
So I would tend to say this is impossible at this time.
Too bad that knowing this will make it impossible forever to jam in realtime with someone playing on the moon. Sigh.
From what I undestand, this type of thing will not work well ever on the Internet as we know it. That is, there is no technology that can come along and overcome the limitations of the infrastructure, other than a redesign of the infrastructure. It’s not likely that will happen any time soon, just for the sake of the few applications that might need that sort of thing.
Maybe someday something like a dedicated city to city pipeline might be designed with a specific protocol that can handle the requirements. Some rich musician needs to pony up the venture capital to make that happen. Then again, I might just be talking out of my ass. It’s been known to happen.
I make it 18.6ms !