The latency war in financial networking continues, today with a couple of victories for the smaller companies involved. RCN Metro, the metro fiber division of RCN Business (NASDAQ:RCNI, news, filings), has won a contract with Lombardi & Co. to provide dedicated Internet service both on the exchange floor and in its headquarters. Lombardi helps institutional investors with access and trading technologies and chose RCN for its “optimal TCO, minimal latency, as well as high throughput and availability”. Yep, there’s that latency bit again, and apparently that recent upgrade to 10GigE in the metro is paying a few dividends.
Not to be outdone, datacenter operator sdxc announced a contract with Forex Capital Markets, which will colocate its primary infrastructure in the new North Bergen facility. FXCM is a foreign exchange broker that handles over 300,000 trades per day and depends on low latency to make everything work smoothly. The North Bergen site is turning out to be a nice alternative for the financial markets, being only 5 miles from the where the action is.
Which just goes to show that there is at least some fire under all that smoke. People are buying the infrastructure that has been getting built, and money is changing hands. But I have my doubts about the usefulness of trading that is faster than human reaction time. It may make traders money, but what value does it really add to the world? And if it adds no value, how long will it be worth doing? Ah well, they’re buying bandwidth while everyone else is waiting, can’t complain about that.
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Categories: Datacenter · Low Latency · Metro fiber
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