He meant that no one had recently been doing it over the old-school S-band radios used for long-range communication between space vehicles. Of course, on the short-range mesh network that the Arkitects had set up to knit the Cloud Ark together, people did it all the time using Scape. But depending on where they were in their orbit, the remnants of the Swarm might be hundreds of thousands of kilometers away from Endurance, far out of mesh range, and so they had to use the same sort of pre-Internet technology that the Apollo astronauts had used to send television signals back from the moon.