Now cable company Hibernia Atlantic is spending $300 million to build a new transatlantic cable to shave 6 milliseconds from the present 65-millisecond transit time between London and New York. It will be the first new cable to cross the Atlantic in a decade and trading firms are likely to pay premium rates to use it.
This is because even though a computer can execute millions of instructions in a microsecond, the furthest light can travel in that time - even in a vacuum - is just 330 metres. That is an age if algorithms are competing to execute the best trades.
"The speed-of-light limitation is getting annoying," Andrew Bach, head of network services at NYSE Euronext, told the European Conference on Optical Communications in Geneva, Switzerland, last week.