On Tue, 28 Apr 2015, Rich Brown wrote:

On Apr 28, 2015, at 4:38 AM, Sebastian Moeller <[email protected]> wrote:

        Well, what I want to see is a study, preferably psychophysics not 
modeling ;), showing the different latency “tolerances” of humans. I am certain 
that humans can adjust to even dozens of seconds de;ays if need be, but the 
goal should be fluent and seamless conversation not interleaved monologues. 
Thanks for giving a bound for jitter, do you have any reference for 
perceptional jitter thresholds or some such?

An anecdote (we don't need no stinkin' studies :-)

I frequently listen to the same interview on NPR twice: first at say, 6:20 am 
when the news is breaking, and then at the 8:20am rebroadcast.

The first interview is live, sometimes with significant satellite delays between the two 
parties. The sound quality is fine. But the pauses between question and answer (waiting 
for the satellite propagation) sometimes make the responder seem a little "slow 
witted" - as if they have to struggle to compose their response.

But the rebroadcast gets "tuned up" by NPR audio folks, and those pauses get 
edited out. I was amazed how the conversation takes on a completely different flavor: any 
negative impression goes away without that latency.

So, what lesson do I learn from this? Pure latency *does* affect the nature of 
the conversation - it may not be fluent and seamless if there's a satellite 
link's worth of latency involved.

Although not being exhibited in this case, I can believe that jitter plays 
worse havoc on a conversation. I'll also bet that induced latency is a good 
proxy for jitter.

satellite round trip latency is on the order of 1 second, which is at the far end of what can be tolerated for VoIP.

Go back to the '80s and '90s when the phone companies were looking at converting from POTS long-distance lines to digital (with ATM) and there was a lot of work done at the time about voice communication and what 'sounds good'. This is a lot fo what drove the ATM design, predictable latency.

David Lang
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