5 ms·

I clicked the story wondering if the speed of light has changed since the late 90s. Apparently not.

• SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
  It’s still speed of light in a medium, which is not speed of light. Electricity over copper it is 2/3 iirc.
  • deadbabe 1y ago
    HFT firms have entire infrastructure that runs very close to the speed of light, beating the competition that runs on antiquated copper.
    • hhmc 1y ago
      There's no competition that's running on copper -- even competitors without latency sensitivity with still be running over fibre because that's just the baseline infrastructure in datacentres, transatlantic etc. Of course, yes, the HFT firms will be using also the standard tricks of microwave towers, shortwave radio, weather balloon etc, to beat the fibre route.
      • deadbabe 1y ago
        There’s always competition running on copper, shitty little traders that think they can beat the big firms.
        • hhmc 1y ago
          I don't think the switches connecting to any real exchanges support this
  • ta1243 1y ago
    speed of packets over copper I think is actually faster than fibre
    • layer8 1y ago
      It seems to depend on the cable type: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_factor#Typical_velocity_factors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_factor#Typical_veloci...
  • connicpu 1y ago
    ~200,000km/s is the speed of light in fiber optics. Electromagnetic propagation in copper is more like 99% c.
    • layer8 1y ago
      The insulating material significantly decreases the propagation speed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_factor#Typical_velocity_factors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_factor#Typical_veloci...