It sounds like you think I'm a web developer who thinks the web is everything. I'm not, and I don't. I work on safety critical systems doing hard-real-time and soft-real-time image analysis, object tracking, data correlation, and tactical overlays for widely distributed systems consisting of a mix of servers, embedded, and customer facing systems. More than one customer has come to me and said - "This is easy - just send it via satellite!"

I have dealt with and feel I have some understanding of the issues here.

Earlier you said[0]:

    "Latency is really not that big of a deal,
     as there are already protocols that deal
     with it quite successfully."

I'd be interested to know of which protocols you speak, and your experience in working with them. I'd be very happy to benefit from your experiences in this regard, as there's always a chance that you know things I don't.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9327656