Even if these are extraordinarily expensive, the fact is that you only need few or few dozen per each world. I think that the instant interstellar communication would justify the cost.

Zel wrote:

The hologram thing doesn’t fit with the explanation, but it’s more dramatic than just reading a letter.

Yes, it is. I’m pretty sure they wanted a holo-chamber for conversations with TIM and someone grafted on the quantum entanglement justification later. They might have just as easily not explain this and instead say it’s conventional communication and simply say that Normandy routinely checks with TIM whenever in range of a Mass Relay and sometimes he wants to talk to Sheppard in person or something.

I was under the impression that these Ansibles were very expensive per bit. It doesn’t say how frequently the dual particle can change states though. I’ll assume it’s quite slow, because otherwise even a 1 bit link can transmit huge amount of data.

It would have made more sense with text data or very long transmission times. The hologram thing doesn’t fit with the explanation, but it’s more dramatic than just reading a letter.

@ Matt`:

My point exactly. :)

Cables are pretty well strictly point-to-point, hasn’t held them back.