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How One Guy Buried a $300 Million Cable to Save 3 Milliseconds and Sold It Back to Wall Street by Austin Liu
A stupid little video short got me started, so I did a little calculating. The cable runs from Chicago to New York or New Jersey, depending on who's telling the story. It's 700 miles as the crow flies, but that route would have to go under Lake Michigan, so it probably wasn't completely straight. Light travels slower in fiber optic cables, about two-thirds of the speed in air. To save 3 milliseconds, the route would need to be 372 miles shorter than a commercially available route. However, fiber optic lines need repeaters every so often to boost the signal. With a good cable you would need a repeater about every 80 miles, so for a 800 mile cable you would need about 10 repeaters. Good repeaters don't slow the signal down much, but who knows what kind of repeaters you would get on a commercial line.
A little more digging turned up this story from 2010:
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