Agreed - it seems to me they’ve built a medium that signals at the described rate, but didn’t actually send data? I could be misreading. I was looking to find who’s TCP/IP stack got pressed into service, but I guess that’s for a future story.

Edit: this isn’t my area of expertise, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28674318 and the provided link explain why even “Internet” (let alone tcp/ip) might be quite orthogonal to what this technology really is.