"the hummingbird project"

People install a straight optical fiber between New York and the Kansas electronic exchange, in order to accelerate transactions, reducing the delay from 17 to 16 milliseconds.

Relevance to me?

My invention, an isotope modified optical fiber,

 will be about 5.6% faster than ordinary germania-doped silica fiber, and thus would reduce the transit time by about a millisecond.

In addition, according to the movie, each regenerator slows the signal by 20 microseconds.  My fiber should have a loss of about 0.001 decibels/kilometer, which means that no regenerators nor amplifiers should be necessary, this saving hundreds more microseconds.