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 against one-way delay 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 of links surviving, coordination quality moves by less than at fixed delay — while the same falls by a factor of five along the delay axis. Even at , zero-delay coordination is perfect (). 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 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.