[perlgeek]

> Think about that, if you had an optical cable running a reasonable (these days) 40 Gbits/second link and it's 3 feet long, that's 120 bits in transit from end to end at any given moment. And

Since glass[1] has an refractive index of roughly 1.5, speed of light in a glass fiber is roughly 2/3 foot per nanosecond, so you actually have 180 bits in transit.

[1]: at least most kinds of glass used in optical fibers and windows, at the wavelenths typically used in optical communications, which tends to be roughly in the range of 800nm to 1500nm