In fact, there is no communication at all between Alice and Bob, let alone instantaneous or faster than light speed communication. What is communicated in a typical Bell experiment is two quantum particles which have been entangled in an apparatus centered between Alice and Bob and sent off to Alice and Bob at speeds well below the velocity of light.

Typical particles are electrons or photons, which can carry a single bit of information corresponding to their spin angular momentum state of up or down when measured by Alice and Bob.

Before their measurement, the spin states are undetermined. The two possible states of up or down are alternative possibilities that are the basis for the creation of new information structures in the universe, including new species in biological evolution, freedom of the human will, and the communication of information, according to the theory of Claude Shannon.

The fact that physical properties of quantum objects do not exist before their measurement was a great concern of Albert Einstein. The fact that those properties are undetermined was an additional bother for Einstein, but he came to accept this. But he could never accept the nonlocality implicit in the entanglement that now enables quantum keys distribution.

Just as a single particle cannot be localized in the two-slit experiment, neither particle in an EPR experiment is localizable until there is a measurement of the two-particle wave function Ψ₁₂, at which time both particles become localized (to within the usual quantum indeterminacy) however far apart they are at that time (in the rest frame of the experiment).

The reason we know some things about the "other" particle as soon as we measure the first one is, as Einstein knew well (but later writers often ignore) the various conservation laws (of energy, momentum, spin angular momentum, etc.). If Bell's inequalities were not violated, the much more fundamental laws of conservation of momentum, angular momentum and spin would be violated.

We have proposed that the conserved spin angular momentum can be considered a hidden constant of the motion and that the emission of entangled particles from the source in the center between the measurements is a common cause of the perfectly correlated measurements. The causal source of the entangled particles is in the past light cone of the measurements, so relativity is not violated. We can illustrate the common cause coming from the center source...

The idea that either Alice or Bob's measurement causes the other's measurement instantaneously, faster than light, has led to a great deal of nonsense about "everything is connected" and mental telepathy.

The great exaggeration of entanglement capabilities comes from thinking that Alice and Bob are communicating at faster than light speed with one another. They are not. Alice and Bob's measurements are creating bits of information when they collapse the two-particle wave function coming from the entanglement apparatus located centrally between them. But since the bits are randomly generated, no meaningful information is being communicated from the causal center to Alice and Bob as well. However, the randomly generated bit strings are valuable as quantum keys.

We can describe Alice and Bob's results as "up" or "down," or plus or minus, or with digital bit sequences 1 or 0.

Alice's measurement sequences appear to her to be completely random, like this, with approximately equal numbers of 1's and 0's, approaching equality for longer bit sequences.

And Bob's sequence looks to him to be equally random, with 1's and 0's approaching 50/50.

But amazingly, should Alice send her bit sequence to Bob for comparison, he discovers that when he lines the bit strings up with one another, they are perfectly anti-correlated. Where Alice measured a 1, Bob measures 0, and vice versa. How can this be?

These random but perfectly correlated bit sequences are perfect for use as one-time pads for encrypting coded messages. And the sequences have not been "communicated" or "distributed" over an ordinary communication channel. They have been created independently and locally at Alice and Bob in a secure way that is invulnerable to eavesdroppers, a partial solution to the problem of quantum key distribution (QKD).

But note that this distribution is very special. It is just between Alice and Bob, who can use their shared key to send one another encoded messages in an open communication channel.

This special key creation and distribution needs a complex apparatus between Alice and Bob to generate the entangled particles (the of the perfect correlation of bits. Any wider key distribution would need to send keys by private couriers or over communication channels secured by some other mechanism.