The Mars rover is using radio signals to communicate with Earth. Radio signals are part of the electromagnetic spectrum and thus travel at the speed of light. Even at the speed of light, it's going to take some number of minutes for radio signals sent from Mars to reach Earth. Unless those hackers are inventing the warp drive, you can't get much faster than that!
Isn't is mostly a bandwidth issue right now? I mean, physics prevent us from currently improving the latency, but we could improve bandwidth for sure. Right now it's fairly low due to distances and power for transmissions.
Reading the NASA site just now the MRO transmits from 400Kbps-5Mbps with a max window of about 16 hours a day. The rover has about 8 minutes per sol to transmit data to the MRO at a rate of about 128Kbps-256Kbps. If the rover goes direct to earth then it drops to 300bps-32Kbps.
I seems like at the very least we could improve by increasing the number of satellites to build out full planet coverage and also keep a transmission point in view of earth at all times. Yes, not cheap, I know.
