Interspace relay

Interspace Relay is a form of communication which is gradually replacing ansible links for communication between relatively distant planets. In fact, when most people refer to an ansible connection, they are probably actually using an IR point.

An Interspace Relay is loosely based on the ansible principle, although precise details of its function are not in the public domain. Angered by the was science was horded by the church, executives and scientists at Interspace Messenger Corp, where this technology was invented, decided to keep their breakthrough out of the hands of the church. This gained them much popularity with free science advocates, while simultaneously allowing them to make a monopoly position by keeping their science secret.

All IR point satellites are owned by IM, and rented to planetary governments.

A relay point can apparently switch couplings much faster than a traditional ansible, using a coding system in which each satellite is described by one from a set of 6⁶ possible 'flavor groupings'. Messages are broadcast to all relays listening on a particular flavor. Switching flavours takes around 3-10ms. In order to allow greater flexibility in the system, a communications tunnel is encrypted, compressed and packetised. This means that with sufficiently optimised routing algorithms, it is not normally necessary for a signal to switch at all except during the route discovery period when new satellites are added.