From: securitiestechnologymonitor.com
By: Laton McCartney
San Diego, CA-based Nexxcom Wireless is claiming it can provide low latency microwave networks between New York and Chicago with roundtrip latency of under 10 milliseconds.
“That’s 3.3 milliseconds faster than the 13.33 milliseconds provided by the Spread Networks fiber facility,” says Sal. S. Benti, chairman and founder of Nexxcom.
Spread Networks, based in Ridgeland, Miss., declined to comment for this story.
Nexxcom has yet to achieve the promised speed, however.
Right now, the company is setting up a microwave network between Chicago and Newark, N.J., that’s being tested by an undisclosed high-speed trading firm.
Round trip speed on this network clocks in at 12 millieseconds, Nexxcom says.
But that time can be beat.
“We are in negotiations with several major trading firms to build networks with roundtrip latency of 10.0 milliseconds,” Benti says.
For all the improvements in high-speed trading such as fast switching, algorithms, and co-location centers, Benti believes the real bang for the buck lies in the transport of messages between two data centers.
He claims that a properly constructed 6 gigahertz wireless network between the same facilities offers a 100 million bit a second duplex circuit with a round trip that could be as low as 9 thousandths of a second, or milliseconds.
Estimates that every millisecond reduced from transmission speeds can be worth up to $100 million to trading firms give impetus to creating new, faster wired and wireless connections.
Benti won’t reveal the identity of potential clients. “Our clients firms are highly secretive about their trading network strategies and given the amount of profits involved, it’s understandable,” he explains.
Benti says that “fiber and microwave complement each other in many areas including high-frequency trading and mobile backhaul for traffic moving under a new generation of Long Term Evolution wireless communications and other technologies.
He argues though that “low latency microwave offers speed advantages with sufficient bandwidth to be most effective for certain HFT applications.”