Let me start this off by saying the idea of noise is excellent and I agree with most uses of it. However, the noise penalty due to distance, as I understand it, makes little sense to me. An incredibly complex virtual reality designed to facilitate world trade is brought to it's knees at a distance over 100 km? So I came up with a different penalty for distance: Latency.
Latency would work simply: To reflect the increased time between commands caused by distance, there would be a negative d6 penalty given say starting at... 500 km and increasing per 1000km or something like that. You would not go negative, but eventually be reduced to just your Initiative with no d6 added. Not sure if this should persist in hosts, as they are considered not to be physically based but perhaps these rules could be adapted. This makes way more sense than throwing in noise for distance.
Now I believe they instituted the noise over distance as a way to force people to get physically close a target. This could still be done with the use of limited noise from distance (I'd cap it at 5ish) or maybe increase the amount of noise due to zones, being on different grids, or atmospheric conditions to name a few. But if I want to check out a local shop in Japan and I'm in France, this should be more than possible.
Thoughts?