"in terms of latency, it should be the fastest." Unfortunately, not even then. Nowadays you generally neglect the latency of the physical act of receiving a bi

"in terms of latency, it should be the fastest." Unfortunately, not even then. Nowadays you generally neglect the latency of the physical act of receiving a bit and being sure whether it is a one or a zero because it is such a small amount of time compared to the other characteristics of the journey, but in this case you can't do that. The amount of time it will take to be sure whether it's a 1 or a 0 being sent will be dwarfed by the amount of time it would take to send a conventional TCP packet containing significantly more than one bit. Note that while we neglect it, it still exists. If you zoom down to a small enough scale, you don't get a pristine series of ones and zeros, but a noisy voltage or light signal, and there can be plenty of attoseconds where the current voltage/light could correspond to either a 0 or a 1 coming in next.