There are a few reasons why we may need an agent, covering one or more factors, ranging from technical, security, commercial and legal compliance perspectives, and we will look at these in turn.

From a technical perspective, an agent may be needed to come into play for several reasons. Some connection techniques and technologies are sensitive (relatively speaking) to the time it can take for a call to be made and responded to. This call and response time challenge, or latency, comes from the fact that, regardless of how good the connections are, data takes time to travel, even over fiber optics. For example, for light to travel from London to Sydney takes 5ms. In reality, we do not have fiber from every location directly to every other location by the shortest path. Even the best parts of the Internet backbone are convoluted and involve moving between servers and network infrastructure as the data works its way across the world, and then will need to go through more...