Over long distances, fibre optic would have lower latency so it'd be shorter if taking the same path today. But these signals would likely have been morse code and sent one-way at a time, so latency wouldn't have been noticed unless the repeaters were people rebroadcasting the signal (no idea how that was done).

My understanding was that the latency was much higher due to manual repeating at stations along the way.

Eg. when the London-Mumbai telegraph was new it took around 45 minutes in one direction.