These long-delay connections are found on international and satellite communications. Over satellite links, this ping time is 600 milliseconds. The amount of data a system can send before it waits to receive an acknowledgement is called the window size. If the window size is too small, the system spends time waiting for acknowledgements instead of sending data. RFC 1323 is the Internet standard to improve TCP performance on high bandwidth, long delay links.
Similar advantages are available at other combinations of packet loss and delay.
The patent filing covers a variety of techniques to accomplish recovery without retransmission. The default selection in the current demo is RED2.