Last Friday Amara wrote down the number that could end the plan: how long a control message takes to get from the dock to Alpha and back over your home WiFi. Wired, on the bench, that round-trip is about 2 ms. The question was always what happens once you cut the cable.
Today Priya pressed start on the rig. We're now timing a real control packet, over the air, against that 2 ms baseline.
The clean-air read came back first, and it behaves. In a quiet room on 5 GHz, a typical round-trip is around 9 ms, and even the worst one in a thousand stayed near 30 ms. No dropouts, no safety stops. On 2.4 GHz it's slower and the spread is wider - more like 14 ms typical, with the bad ones out around 60 ms - but still no holes in the data.
Here's the honest part: clean air was never the test. A quiet room is the easy case, and the easy case was always going to look fine. The test is the bad one - 2.4 GHz with a microwave running and a video call going, the kind of congested home that spooked us on the 17th. That run goes over the next couple of days, and an early peek already caught a single spike past 200 ms. That tail, not the 9 ms, is the number that tells us whether a cheap all-on-dock body can actually hold.
So this is "we're measuring," not "we've decided." The clean read is encouraging. It isn't a verdict. The verdict is the spike, and we don't have enough of those yet to call anything. When we do, you'll see it here - whichever way it falls.
- Callum