“Time? They ain’t making any more of it, so you gotta get in, and get out, or you’ll get your f**king face ripped off…” screamed an old Chicago Merc floor trader at my grad school class during a field trip. I nodded, like the rest of the class, figuring he knew what he was talking about and also not wanting to further provoke this human ball of fury.

But he was wrong. The kind folks who make their living providing services to financial types have been manufacturing time for decades now. And they’ve hit a new milestone.

McKay Brothers just announced that their new microwave-based network can roundtrip a signal between suburban Chicago and New Jersey in only 8.23 milliseconds. The previous record, set by Spread Networks back in October, was an utterly lame 12.98ms over a fiber optic connection.

Translating this to human terms, traveling the 816 miles between Aurora, IL and Newark, NJ in 8.23ms is equivalent to speeding along at a little over 358 million miles per hour. If you aren’t in a big hurry, you could use the Spread Networks fiber and travel at a leisurely 227 million mph.

McKay claims that microwave transmission is faster than fiber can ever be, which is true to a point. It’s all about something called the refractive index, which is essentially how well (or poorly) light passes through a material. In other words, it’s how much a material slows light down vs. light traveling unhindered through a vacuum. Water has a refractive index of about 1.33; a brick would be much higher. Air has a refractive index of 1.0003, while fiber optic cable is around 1.5 or so. So the maximum theoretical speed of microwave transmission is a lot higher than you can get via fiber.

But there are other considerations such as how much data you can transmit (bandwidth) over a given period of time, and the latency cost of signal amplification/relay when covering long distances.

The biggest consideration, however, could very well be the reliability of the transmission mechanism. McKay’s press release contains this passage:

McKay is also focused on reliability. “The network was down 1% of the time during trading hours in December and January,” said Meade, “so our clients had the fastest connection 99% of the time.”

So 1% downtime during trading hours over a two-month period? Ouch. That isn’t all that reliable, particularly when compared to the aforementioned Spread Network (they’re the ones with the tortoise-like speed of 227 million mph), who claim 99.999% availability. McKay’s marketing partner, a company called Quincy Data, addresses this issue prominently on their website:

Better to be fast 99% of the time than slow 99.999% of the time.

Now that’s world-class vendor spin.