Why do I see the message "The SCORM player has determined that your Internet connection is unreliable ..."?

The message has been reported by a very small number of course participants:

"The SCORM player has determined that your Internet connection is unreliable or has been interrupted. If you continue in this SCORM activity, your progress may not be saved. You should exit the activity now, and return when you have a dependable Internet connection."

This issue has been investigated in some detail as noted below:

• The server at http://elearning.ihtsdotools.org is a standard Moodle 2.8 instance and the presentations are SCORM 1.2 conformant packages.
• We have extensively researched incidents of this error on the Moodle community board and understand that this issue relates to either generally poor internet connectivity or internet latency greater than 2 seconds.
  • We note that both people who raised this issue indicated they had good Internet connections so the likely issue is Internet latency rather than bandwidth limitations.
• Some contributors to Moodle community boards on this topic have argued for change in or configurability of the settings that generate this message. However, this has been rejected by Moodle developers based on a high risk of failure to record progress where connections fall below this level.
• As a result, I regret that SNOMED International cannot alter this setting. 

Additional notes

1. Moodle is a widely used Learning Management System (LMS) and version 2.8 is the most recent established version.
2. SCORM is a standard for presentations that is supported by Moodle and many other LMS systems.
3. Latency is typically a problem where geostationary satellite transmission is used for communication or where there are "slow" servers between the client and server systems (for more information search for "internet latency"). While data throughput may still be high the lag in responsiveness to messages between client and server leads to timeouts with some interactive services.