Not at all. In the context of the date of the article he addresses the physical limitations in place at the time, implying devices that don't come close to the

Not at all. In the context of the date of the article he addresses the physical limitations in place at the time, implying devices that don't come close to the physical limitation can see improvement. >No matter how small the amount of data, for any particular network device there's always a minimum time that you can never beat. That's called the latency of the device. For a typical Ethernet connection the latency is usually about 0.3ms (milliseconds -- thousandths of a second). For a typical modem link the latency is usually about 100ms, about 300 times worse than Ethernet. Furthermore, he directly addresses the possibilities of improving things in software, including buffering. Maybe not the fantasy algorithmic improvements you're speculating about but concrete design improvements in the modem stack available at the time. >Because when you use the Geoport adapter the modem software is running on the same CPU as your TCP/IP software and your Web browser, it could know exactly what you are doing. When your Web browser sends a TCP packet, there's no need for the Geoport modem software to mimic the behaviour of current modems. It could take that packet, encode it, and start sending it over the telephone line immediately, with almost zero latency. You're correct about many of our current latency issues being giant buffers developed to chase peak throughput for a marketing number instead of the low latency numbers that affect directly affect the (IMO) most interesting uses of the network: realtime interactive applications like communication and gaming.