ms@ccieng5.UUCP (Mark L. Stevans) (10/17/83)
I hope no one minds if I send my comment to the great net.general long distance delay discussion to net.misc: I made a number of long distance telephone conversations this summer (from San Diego, CA to Rochester, NY), and on several of them (I'd say about 3 out of 20), a delay was noticeable. These delays may be timed using a simple system I worked out with a friend, by which caller X begins counting "one two three four five one two three four five" at as uniform a rate as possible. Caller Y joins in at the middle of the sequence, attempting to count in unison with X. To caller X, however, Y may appear to be lagging behind. The longest delay we encountered was somewhere between 1 and 2 seconds. Note that this is a measurement of two-way transmission time, not one-way. The most interesting thing about these delays is that they are completely indistinguishable from gross stupidity on the part of the other party. Even when you ask the simplest questions, like "OK?", it takes them an unusually long time to answer, so it seems they have spent the interim thinking. Another phenomenon that manifested itself, but only once, is the "transcontinental echo". If I spoke at normal volume, everything was OK, but if I raised the volume of my voice above a certain level, I would hear a faint and very distorted echo about 2 seconds after my exclamation. My friend claims that the TE has the singular characteristic of always being a one-way echo, i.e. when one party experiences it, the other never does. I didn't bother to time the associated two-way delay using the above timing method. The TE delay and the two-way delay may not have been identical, depending on where the echo was generated. Mark Stevans ritcv!ccieng5!ms