https://farplay.io/

The claim
“ FarPlay reduces the audio delay between yourself and others to the absolute minimum, so much so that you can play music together over the internet in real-time.‘

Extremely interesting. Ideal for remote performances, where latency has previously been a significant issue.

And the price is very reasonable too!

Not following the logic. The lag comes from the internet connection. How can you change latency that happens at your ISP and across the backbones on zee infrawebz? If somebody buys it please let me know. I am not going to buy it because I wouldn't use it but as a networking geek I am interested in know IF it works, and if it does, HOW.

Wow, I thought this was impossible! So cool.

...and is 100% free during the open beta. Some kind of dark magic?

Many years ago now I had a chap call in an issue regarding login to a secure session from Australia to some place in the USA which had security built in to disconnect any session not completed the round trip within 100msec. The issue was that any round trip to the USA was 160msec. I had a major issue explaining that transmission was limited to less than the speed of light (at best 90% I’d the speed of light). At the time all transmission was basically serialised even on high speed fibre. Packet prioritisation was not really that well handled.

These days there are many better ways of prioritising packets and methods that will allow parallel paths to make things faster but to my way of thinking there will always be some latency. There will be about 13msecs or so just from the mic into the PC. It looked to me she was already starting the clap in anticipation before he clapped. But then again even when playing together there is a lot of anticipation that holds a group together.

Yep, maybe the technology will help but it will not completely stop latency. Anticipation will play a major part.

My thoughts

Tony

Hi Eddie. It's apparently free (at least for the moment).
I suspect it just uses more efficient routing, but that's only a guess.
Trev

It's all about the internet connection folks. They are located in France and Switzerland and they stated their latency is around 16-17 MS AND both of them are on Fiber connections, which is ultra fast, if you are lucky to have the luxury.

I am in Springfield, MO and I just did a ping test from Springfield to Des Moines,IA (about the same distance) and my latency was 60ms download and 123ms upload.

That would defiantly not be acceptable for this purpose.

You can't go any faster then the traffic on the freeway.

I'll pass until I can get connected to fiber.

I'm on 20mb DSL.... I wonder how well that would work for me.... (don't answer that)

Could you try two cans and a tight piece of string? (runs, ducking for cover )

- Oh, sorry, I wasn't supposed to answer. Apologies.

I haven't tried it yet but the concept sounds cool. My ASSumption is that you may get hung up on the delayed signal. Even on the demo they said they had to shift the video time so that it appeared they clapped when they did. I guess if both parties are on the best internet, it could work.

Steve, you live in Spectrum land like I do. I have aping of 43ms and downstream of 247.7 mbps. I have no idea why they leave the upstream at 12 mbps, but through all the speed increases they have never changed that provisioning for more than 12 mpbs up.

Were you down Tuesday night at all, or don't you use them for TV? I use their streaming and the auth server must have gone down because for 6 hours nobody could log into it. They have 10 million "TV by stream only" users so you can imagine the phone call and online traffic they had. Eventually they either shut the phones off on purpose or they got overloaded and died on their own. People were reporting that they'd call in, get 1 ring, and it would hang up.

Nope. We have the 1 Gig service for internet only. We get our TV through Amazon Firesticks connected to each TV in the house. The Firesticks all connect to the Spectrum internet wirelessly. We "cut the cable" a couple of years ago for TV.

There are several companies developing similar products.

Audiomovers, SessionWire, and ConnectionOpen

ConnectionOpen, is the VOIP solution that doesn’t compromise on audio quality. It allows voice talent and studios to collaborate remotely using uncompressed audio, from start to finish, with minimal latency. Webcam video and screen sharing are also supported, to communicate and share ideas visually too. This is what they say.

SessionWire, “I was able to monitor through Sessionwire in LA what was happening in Japan while setting up to record a drum kit. Because this is an audio engineering class, we really wanted the high-quality audio in stereo. Sessionwire, with its high-quality audio feature, was perfect for that” What someone in LA said.

Audiomovers, I have actually used Audiomovers from Miami to New York City. The results were mixed. On some days there was next to no latency but on other days it was unusable. Both myself and the people in New York had one gig fiber connections.

I don't see how any software could provide routing from one POP to the next.

There is going to be latency no matter what. The signal is about 1.5 times slower in fiber than in air.

I just checked the internet speed that I pay $70 a month for and it is running at 1/10 the correct speed. AT&T is always a rip-off. Welcome to living in a third-world country.

The South Korean government has encouraged its citizens to get computers and to hook up to high-speed Internet connections by subsidizing the price of connections for low-income and traditionally unconnected people.

We are too poverty-stricken here I guess to have high-speed internet for everyone.

Billy

EDIT: Got my internet back up to speed. Only took 30 min on the phone with AT&T.

The two people in the video are not very far apart and with a good internet connection, they should normally be able to work in very near real-time. Paris, in general, has poor internet speeds. Bern has good internet speeds and about 16% higher average speeds than the USA.

Also, Zoom has some enhanced audio that can be turned on.

There is delay from the instrument into the pc followed by delay from the pc to the router then from the router to the first step to the ISP and this goes on to every router on every hop. Sometimes a connection can have multiple parallel paths allowing packets of data to go down different paths which may make things faster. However once packets reach the end router they must be realigned into the original order.

All of this can take time. Even on a Gigabit service each bit follows the one ahead therefore there must be a little latency even assuming no errors or retransmission.

A speed test on my link for example shows a ping response 40ms to a server 100 or so Km away on a link that delivers 50Mbits. Since retiring I don’t handle this sort of stuff anymore.

There are ways to fudge it but unless Einstein was wrong there are limitations to speed. The limitation will result in delay (or if you prefer Latency).

My thoughts
Tony

Lol.... yeah, we live back in the woods. I'm about 1000' from the road. We bought this place specifically because the house is not visible from the road.... in fact you can't see it until you're almost at the house. We wanted privacy after having lived in a neighborhood where the neighbors on all sides and several houses away could see what you were doing in your backyard. When I bought it, we contacted Spectrum to run their internet cable to the house. The day of the scheduled install, they were a no-show. About 2 hrs later, and a labyrinth of phone menus later, I finally got in touch with a lady who then explained..... Sir.... you live off the road a distance. By my satellite view, it looks like there are 4 power poles from the street to your house. We don't count the first one but to run past the distance to the first one is approximately $4000 per giving you a total install cost of $12,000 which must be paid up front before we will install for you.

Uhhh, nope.

So I called the DSL phone company who offered the install for their normal $49.99 even after I explained that it was 1000'. No problem Sir. When would you like this installed? They left the service pedestal, ran 200' up the side of the road, bored under the road, and buried 1000' on my land up the power line right of way to the house. The technician gave us a balanced DSL line so we'd have 20mbs. Unfortunately, it was the fastest he could offer based on the equipment in the area.

Apparently, the government subsidies to make sure under-served areas have access to high speed internet don't apply to me.

For a while I thought I was going to have to do like one of my customers who lives further off the road than I do. They have to use a cellphone hotspot for their internet. I wasn't going to go with satellite internet no matter what.

Herb
I have a friend who lives in a remote area and had difficulties with internet speed and performance. He installed a 5G wireless modem and now has blazingly fast internet, faster than my fiber connection. It might not be for everyone, but it worked for him.

Any idea how far he is from a tower, Trev? The tower proximity is key. When I am close to a tower I get amazing speed on my 5G. But when I get into less populated areas the towers are further between and that performance varies. When I first got a 5G phone I used a tower map and tested at varying distances and it is really great when you are near a tower that is a higher power tower. For home internet, since neither your home or the tower are moving, I would imagine that once you locate your modem in the best place in the house it's great. I live within 1000 feet of my closest tower. Yet I have spots inside my house where I get 1 bar of 5G. (Wall densities, amount of clutter between point A and point B, etc...) For me, just inside my kitchen door is where I put my phone when I am using it as a modem because Spectrum is out. I am waiting for AT&T to have their 5G+ available where I am to see what that gives me. It's in downtown Cleveland but not here 40 miles away.

Hi Eddie. No, I'm not sure of the distance involved. He lives in another State. But I'll ask him next time I'm speaking with him. I do agree that distance, signal strength etc all play a major part in performance.

Cell phone towers are placed wherever the carrier can rent or buy a tower site in the United States.

In central Europe, the cell phone tower location is dictated by the government of the country in question. I don't think I have ever dropped a call in Europe. I am sure it must be possible to do so. My experience with cell phone service in Europe has been good at all locations.

Before the hurricane in 2017, the cell service in Marathon, Florida, was terrible. After the hurricane, new tower equipment was installed at the same towers, and the service was excellent.

The worst internet connection I ever had was using a $5000 dollar-plus satellite earth station I had installed in the mountains in California before consumer systems were available. The consumer satellite systems I have used also are awful.

I have a satellite phone which works great anywhere I have been in the world. I mainly use it in case of an emergency on the boat. So... high-quality satellite communication is possible but pretty slow for text data and relatively expensive. It costs around $500 per year to have around 600 minutes of air time. I have never used more than 45 minutes. It is only for the boat and is used by my neighborhood friends during a hurricane.

Poor Herb...the actual cost of exterior fiber cable is about $250 for 1000 feet. Trenching costs anywhere from $1 to $6 dollars per foot if you own the land. Or free if you do it yourself and have the equipment. There is the fiber splicing cost and Spectrum's hook-up charge. None of that adds up to the $12,000 Spectrum was asking for. Spectrum must be related to the lovely people at AT&T...lol

Very useable near real-time internet-based audio and visual communication is currently available and is being used all over the world as we speak.

Billy

I am testing 5G right now as I type.
So far I don't see much difference between it and cable in day to day use.
It 'measures' a little less on Speed Test but functionally stable.
Only problem I have is one Samsung TV keeps losing connection every few hours. It is not that the 5G has a problem it is the TV. It doesn't happen with any other device.
Turning the TV Off/On resolves the issue, so easy to fix, but a pain in the behind when it happens with 45 seconds left in the game. <grin>

This is after using it for three days 24 hours a day (I work remote).
Uploads/Downloads, video calls, VPN etc all seem fine. I'm kind of impressed.
We got in on the "introductory/test" phase in our area so if we decide to stick with it we have a guaranteed lifetime price that is less than half of our cable internet cost currently.

5G results below.
Not ultraComFast but more than serviceable for my house.
The upload speed is actually more than twice what cable was, download is a little slower.
I was testing using a server in our hosting location 60 miles away.

Interesting screenshot because it shows something that may not be obvious.

The data speeds are fast, but the ping times are fairly slow. I'm uncertain of the precise meanings of the values as the times have icons that are ambiguous, but even the lowest time shown of 27ms will be quite noticeable.

One issue is that high throughputs are often partly achieved by compression, which costs time when the data is compressed before sending and decompressed upon receipt.

To add to this using a VPN can slow down your speeds. A couple of times a change in my VPN locations eliminated a slow speed.

What's interesting to me is what you found interesting.
I remoted into my work computer (physically 20 miles closer) and pinged a server in the same data center, and the ping times were comparable (that was using a host name).
I tried the same thing using an IP on the same server instead and it improved by about 9 mS
For my area and the data center I was testing against, it doesn't seem abnormal to me. I wasn't pinging Cloudflare, just one of our servers in a colocation data center a ways away.

What *I* found interesting was that my upload speed appears to be 3X faster than my previous cable connection.

That used to be around the 11-13 range that was common with various other connections I have checked in the past, now it is around 35-36 ...

So I tried the same test on a Canadian server (I am in the US by the border) and ping slowed down but download speed went up significantly (from 106 to 150+).
I think the ping may not be the best ruler to measure by for this particular test. I used Ookla FWIW (below image)
I also tried another server in Detroit and got 50 for Ping, and 124 download and 39+ upload, so .. I dunno, seems ping isn't the best scale to measure against for Ookla tests
The upload increase is what caught my eye
Anyway, just trying to say, 5G is an option for those trying to 'cut the cable' in my experience, looks like it will save me a bunch of $$ so far, and maybe improve things for those with limited options. Worth checking out

5G at my house STINKS. As soon as I get in the car and start driving the speed goes up considerably. I have seen those 150mpbs speeds but only when I was right under a tower. Typically I see 55-75 while driving around with a TV show playing in the background. (NOT watching!)

For playing music what you need is the low latency that Farplay suggests it offers.
The ping times are an approximate measure of the latency across the link between the two machines. Upload and download speeds are for data throughput, but for music the amount of data one's transferring is modest.

Edit: FWIW, your speeds are also 3-5 times faster than my cable (FTTC), my ping times are similar at 19ms.