Streaming Games? Streaming VR and AR content? Lower latencies will allow more seamless video conferences. Right now our interface planes are still very 2D, which still has a steep learning curve compared to our 3D world.
Sure, but latency and bandwidth are different things. Reducing latency by a few orders of magnitudes would open up tons of applications (not sure i agree that video conf is one of them, dont think latency of internet is the main issue there) but i don't think we are likely to see much beyond incremental improvements (light only travels so fast)
More bandwidth == less switching == lower latency.
Also light can travel from point A to the diametrically opposite point on the surface of earth in 66ms.
Currently it takes 227ms to ping New York from Tokyo[1]. As light travels, those two cities are only 36ms away from each other. Seems like there is plenty of room for improvement, even given the speed of light.
That's within 1 (base 10) order of magnitude of the theoretical max (which seems like it would be very hatd to get close to). Sure there is room for incremental improvements, but we're not going to be making order of magnitude improvements.
We already have the actual information traveling at the max speed, the delta is purely the cost of indirect routes and switching. It seems very reasonable to assume we could get much closer to the theoretical max.
Also this is obviously only a max speed if we never figure out superluminal communication, which... [fingers crossed]