"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,

   [1]https://www.freepatentsonline.com/9459401.html

    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.

References

   1. https://www.freepatentsonline.com/9459401.html