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Aussie Telco Lays New Fiber For Microsecond Trading Boost

Posted by samzenpus on from the we-can-make-it-faster dept.

schliz writes "Australian data center and telecommunications provider Vocus has installed two new underwater fiber links across the Sydney Harbor in a bid for the lowest connection latency between the city's financial district and the Australian Securities Exchange's recently opened data center, north of the CBD. The project involved 1.6 kilometers of custom, 312-core single-mode optical fiber cable, and was expected to deliver a route that is 400 meters shorter than existing links. RTFA for pretty installation photos."

6 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. Not surprising by ducomputergeek · · Score: 4, Informative

    I have a friend who is a developer for a hedge fund where they pay him and a few others north of $250k each per year (it is NYC) to try and and shave milliseconds off transactions. They spend big bucks trying anything to reduce a transaction time from 4ms to 3ms or lower.

    --
    "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
    1. Re:Not surprising by MRe_nl · · Score: 3, Informative

      "The problem with the world is eventually you run into people like Thatcher". - MRe_nl

      All money is other people's money: my expenditure is your income and vice versa.
      Thatcher was a whip used on the lower and middle-classes in the UK. Her continued praising leaves me baffled.

      --
      "Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
    2. Re:Not surprising by Datamonstar · · Score: 5, Informative

      There was a good talk at Defcon about those networks. They can't afford to run any security, even as an afterthought and they are completely open with nothing but a dust-thin layer of obscurity covering them. All in the name of the dollar.

      --
      The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
  2. Re:looks like a.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    This is a privately owned cable.

  3. Re:If the NSA submarine cuts the line to tap it . by niftydude · · Score: 2, Informative

    . . . does that add more latency to the line? Can you measure actual versus expected latency to see if your undersea lines have been tapped?

    No - you can use something like a 1:99 optical splitter so they'll barely notice the signal drop, and will add about 5mm of optical fiber into the line, so they won't notice any additional latency (less than 20 picoseconds). Then run your 1% signal into an optical amplifier, say an EDFA, and snoop to your hearts content.

    --
    You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
  4. Re:High-Frequency Trading by neyla · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not really. Stock-exchanges should either just enforce once-a-minute matching (with lottery determining which trades to fulfill if there's several takers), or they should just set some minimal fee for every non-filled order which stands for less than a minute, 1% of the order-value would be plenty, probably even 0.1% of the order-value would be enough to stop HFT dead.

    They're taking steps, some of them, but it's baby-steps. For example the Norwegian stock-exchange is adding a $0.01 fee for every trade - for those traders who file more than 70 orders for every *one* that goes trough, only orders which are withdrawn before 1 second has passed, are counted.

    This is an *extremely* timid step. Make it $1, one in ten, and 1 minute rather than 1 second, and we're talking.