"Even though the animals were on different continents, with the resulting noisy transmission and signal delays, they could still communicate, " said Miguel Pais-Vieira, another member of the team.
It means that Dr Schneider can tell whether or not the signal from any particular binding site is too noisy to be useful in other words, whether it is a damaging mutation.
For voice the difference will be a clean completed call or a noisy dropped call, for data services the better the signal strength the higher the data rate you will obtain in both directions.