Abstract
A real communication link degrades in two ways at once: messages arrive late (delay) and some arrive not at all (loss). Design intuition often treats these together as "bad connectivity," but they are distinct resources — latency and throughput — and a system that is limited by one is not helped by fixing the other. We separate them. On a delivery-gated communication model in a simplified 3-D kinematic swarm simulator — where a peer link is exercised only if a packet actually survives an independent per-link Bernoulli drop — we sweep the drop probability $p \in [0, 0.99]$ against one-way delay $d \in {0, 5, 10, 20}$ steps for two decentralized primitives (gossip-consensus and flocking) on the mutual-rendezvous task. The result is a strong null for throughput: across the entire loss axis, from every link delivered to only $\approx 2%$ of links surviving, coordination quality $Q$ moves by less than $0.012$ at fixed delay — while the same $Q$ falls by a factor of five along the delay axis. Even at $p = 0.99$, zero-delay coordination is perfect ($Q = 1.00$). Coordination on these peer-derived-target tasks is governed by information staleness, not delivered rate: the delivered-loss curves collapse onto a single delay curve. We validate the gating model against the ungated result (at $p = 0$ the two agree exactly) before trusting the sweep. The practical reading, relevant to any spatially distributed fabric that must coordinate over a shared medium — sensor fields, robot teams, and satellite constellations coordinating over lossy inter-node links — is that link capacity is the wrong thing to buy: coordination is bought with latency. We scope the claim precisely: this is a simulation-based algorithmic result about coordination primitives under lossy delay, not physical-device validation.