Why is there a delay when reporters give live news reports from far away countrys?

Answer 1

When you see that peculiar long delay, you can be sure that the live report is

coming into the local studio through a communications satellite link.

Radio (and TV, and light) does take time to travel from place to place. Normally, on earth,

the trips are so short that we don't perceive the delay, but when you start dealing with

signals that leave the immediate vicinity of the earth's surface, it starts to become noticeable.

If you've ever seen videos of conversations with the Apollo astronauts on the moon

during the 1970s, those are always slow and leisurely, because it takes radio (and light)

almost 1.3 seconds to make the trip between earth and moon. So if mission controllers

asked a question of someone on the moon, the soonest the reply could begin to be

heard was 1.3 seconds to get there + 1.3 seconds to get back = almost 2.6 seconds,

which was very noticeable.

The distance between the earth's surface and a geostationary communications satellite

is roughly double the earth's circumference. It does take up-link and down-link time

for a signal to be repeated through a satellite, and nowadays, it's not unusual for

a single communications path to include twosatellite hops before it gets to where

it's going.

And one more thing: Every time an analog signal (like a voice) is translated into

digital data, or a data stream is used to reconstruct a sound, the process takes time.

There's a very simple and intriguing way to see this. Make a cell-phone call to a friend

who's with you in the same room, and watch the delay through the cell-phone path.