You get delays every time the signal passes through repeaters or routers; it's not the speed of the signal down the wire. The more distance, the more hardware, the more delay You get additional delays because packets are sent through diverse routes and may not arrive in the correct order and signal corruption (which can be liked to the length of the wire) may mean that packets need to be resent [spoiler]The real techies out there may be able to add more detail or correct any mistakes I've made here[/spoiler]