HasturCom Patent of the Week

Introduction
Deep in the bowels of HasturCom's R'lyeh campus, the Elder Things have tiled a twisty passage with myterious signs and sigils. Each tile commemorates one of HasturCom's many original patents. Whenever the terms of my servitude bend my path towards that eldritch citadel, I always take a minute to walk that brazen corridor, and attempt to grok the fullness of one such patent.

A Method For Reducing Latency in Voice Communications Over Data Networks
The beauty of transmitting analog information over digital media is that you don't always need all the information.

There's often a delay--"latency"--between when you speak into your mouthpiece and your interlocutor hears your words in their earpiece. This patent describes one solution to this problem:

First, it is understood that the analog information--your spoken voice--is converted into digital information. This digital information is organized into "frames", and each frame is transmitted across the network to whoever it is you're talking to. At the far end, the frames of digital information are converted back into an analog stream, which that person hears as a reasonable facsimile of your original speech.

If, however, the network detects latency, it reduces this delay by periodically "dropping" a frame. This results in less data for the network to transmit, and thus speeds up the process. The person listening to your speech doesn't notice the missing frames, because the conversion from digital to analog masks the gaps in the stream (which are individually so brief that they fall below the human threshold for detection).

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, somebody needed to patent that? Apparently so.