No, he's not. He is actually just someone pretending that they are an electrical engineer. First and foremost, latency is not a pure function of distance. It is a derived benchmark involving the time when an action began, and when it concludes. That time is a function of throughput, distance, computational capacity, and node traffic.

You certainly can decrease latency through increased compression. Compression does not increase your bandwidth. Your bandwidth is a static metric dictated by the throughput of your line (Dialup is slower than ISDN is slower than Cable is slower than T1/3).

Unfortunately, the genius you so love has got it completely backwards. They are not increasing bandwidth, they are decreasing packet size and traffic (through compression).

Latency if < 1ms is achievable, if you are within a certain distance. That distance can be found here. As long as you are within approximately 299,000 meters, you can achieve a 1 ms latency (299,000 meters being the distance one photo travels in a milisecond). Does that make sense to everyone?

Now, to be honest, that is completely outside the realm of logic, and no businessman or technologist would make that claim short of having an ansible--but that isn't the point.

tl;dr: mail234x^69 doesnt really know what he is talking about, he just wants you to think he is smart.

"The round trip latency from pushing a button on a controller and it going up to the server and back down, and you seeing something change on screen should be less than 80 milliseconds.

"We usually see something between 35 and 40 milliseconds."

Compression decreases the size of data packets sent, therefore decreasing the amount of messages that must be transfered, therefore decreasing latency. Compression does not make the packets go faster, it makes the transmission as a whole go faster.

It allows for increased throughput by decreasing the number of packets transmitted (as such, reducing message transmit time, and the possibility of transmission errors through a decreased population space.

Additionally, your calculations are partially incorrect, because you are not accomodating for the refractive index of transmission medium. The higher the refractive index, the slower light travels in this medium. Your statement of 299,000 m/ms is true in a medium with a refractive index of 1. The quality of lines does vary, but it does not vary up to 66%.

Everyone not on North America.

Even though compression is boosting throughput, eg you get more pixels coming though, it still will take time for the commands to get though and the video to get back, even if they managed to fit 720p in 1MB of space via compression.