A British company will spend 300 million dollars to lay a new cable under the Atlantic, linking London to New York.
The track has been carefully calculated to be slightly shorter and thus have a shorter transmission time: 6 milliseconds faster.
Pay 300 million dollars to save just 6 milliseconds?? Is it worth it?
Apparently, yes. Using the line will cost 100 times more than a normal line: it is reserved for financial brokers who trade thousands of shares per day. An advantage of 6 milliseconds would result in an annual gain of 100 million dollars.
In fact, in my experiments, a few seconds cost me 5 euros...