The Spread Networks corporation recently laid down 825 miles of fiberoptic cable between New York and Chicago, stretching across Pennsylvania, for the sole purpose of reducing the latency of microsecond trades to less than 13.33 milliseconds (http://www.spreadnetworks.com/spread-networks/spread-solutions/dark-fiber-networks/overview). The lesson I would draw from this is that, in the near future, oil and natural gas extraction won't be the only lucrative use of ocean platforms.

So here's my question - since trades are occurring on the scale of tens to hundreds of microseconds, and considering the amount of money involved, can one use neutrino beams to beat the limitation due to having to travel the great-circle/orthodromic distance between two trading hubs? I'm imagining something similar to the MINOS detector (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINOS), where a neutron beam was generated at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, and detected ~735 km away, ~700 meters under the ground in a Northern Minnesota mine.

Is it possible to beat a signal traveling at the speed of light across the great-circle distance from, say, New York to Tokyo, using a neutron beam traveling the earth? Is it realistic to talk about generating these beams on a microsecond time-scale?

Addendum - Over what distances can you reasonably detect a neutrino beam?

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Considering how hard it is to detect neutrinos, the advantages of having a shorter distance would be largely offset by the size of the detectors you'd need to read out messages. I don't think we even have enough control on neutrinos to even form a message to start with. I think your post belongs in scifi.SE . –  Raskolnikov Jul 27 '11 at 8:04
@ Raskolnikov - neutrinos can be generated on demand by muon decay. –  Richard Terrett Jul 27 '11 at 8:13
@Richard Oh yes and it is possible to modulate that beam up to GHz frequencies with a shutter, right? –  Georg Jul 27 '11 at 8:44
""for the sole purpose of reducing the latency of microsecond trades to less than 13.33 milliseconds"" Mhmmm microsecond trades down to 13 milliseconds? Strange. –  Georg Jul 27 '11 at 8:47
@user8861""for the sole purpose of reducing the latency of microsecond trades to less than 13.33 milliseconds "" Meanwhile I looked up that link, I could not find that the cable was laid for that "sole purpose" –  Georg Jul 27 '11 at 8:56

If we consider a continuous lossless fibre optic link between antipodes around the equator, the transmission time will be about 99 ms, whilst the through-earth travel time (at $\approx{c}$) is 42 ms. Obviously this counts for nothing if you have high-latency equipment at either end.