It's usually stated in meters per second, a somewhat dry, cognitively inaccessible number. Try flipping it around though .. 3.336 microseconds per kilometer P

It's usually stated in meters per second, a somewhat dry, cognitively inaccessible number. Try flipping it around though .. 3.336 microseconds per kilometer People, software engineering types anyway, have a feel for what a microsecond is; a CPU can get a quite noticeable amount of work done in a microsecond - and it takes three and a third of those just to reach the coffee shop on the corner! Jump across a continent, and now you're talking latencies on par with early 1980s disk systems. That being said, there's not too much you can do about the latency, 3E8 is the law, so we may as well fiddle with bandwidth.