Fiber cables made of air move data at 99.7 percent the speed of light

My guess is that the first customers for this cable will be in the finance industry. A 30% improvement in latency doesn't matter much for the layman, but in finance, it can mean significant amounts of money. Already, an enterprising trader constructed a more direct line from Chicago -&#62; NYC [1]. Going from 16ms -&#62; 13ms was apparently worth $300 million. This fiber could bring a very large profit if you had exclusive rights to it via a patent. You could execute guaranteed-to-profit arbitrage strategies between any two markets if you were willing to build out the network. And no one could compete with you for a whole 15 years!<p>[1] <a href="http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0927/outfront-netscape-jim-barksdale-daniel-spivey-wall-street-speed-war.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0927/outfront-netscape-jim...</a>

As an aside, if this is rolled out widely, can we finally come to terms with the genius of Senator Ted Stevens metaphor about the internet being a "Series of tubes." :)<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes</a>

&#62; Researchers say they have created fiber cables that can move data at 99.7 percent of the speed of light, all but eliminating the latency plaguing standard fiber technology.<p>If by "all but eliminating" they mean "reducing by 31%".<p>There's a hard limit to how low latency can go. We've been close to it for years. So a hop takes 100 ms instead of 150 ms? They're still in the same ballpark. To have a revolutionary impact, it would have to drop the latency an order of magnitude, which, as far as we understand our universe, is impossible.<p>I guess the real application is over short distances. I'd love to hear the ideal usecase that benefits from this improvement.

Financial field isn't the only one that cares about latency. I'm still waiting for it to become feasible to jam (play music together) remotely. This gives me hope, but the real solution is still far away. Interesting how despite all the tech progress this (deceivingly simple) problem is still unsolved.

Laying this new fiber would probably be economically viable for low latency trading. They're already building microwave networks to take advantage of the spread between speed of light in air and glass (<a href="http://www.securitiestechnologymonitor.com/news/mckay-brothers-spread-networks-chicago-new-york-29829-1.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.securitiestechnologymonitor.com/news/mckay-brothe...</a>). Based on the fact that most long haul networks use fiber rather than microwave, I would assume that fiber is more economical than microwave.

Woohoo, low latency counter strike from Asia to US!