Fun article, but I don't completely buy the conclusion. The propagation speed of cat-5, coax and fiber optic cable all fall in the neighborhood of ~60-70% the s

Fun article, but I don't completely buy the conclusion. The propagation speed of cat-5, coax and fiber optic cable all fall in the neighborhood of ~60-70% the speed of light in vacuum. Also it's very unlikeliness to have anything resembling a straight line path from the mail server to the destination. If the connections were aborted in a bit over 3ms you would have much shorter range than 500 miles, I'd guess something like 1/4 to 1/2 that distance between the lower propagation speed and indirect path.