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Verizon to Sell Super-Fast Broadband to Wall Street Traders

Phillip Dampier April 17, 2012 Broadband Speed, Competition, Verizon 3 Comments

While your phone company refuses to provide you with better than 3Mbps DSL, Verizon Communications is set to unveil its fastest broadband network yet — targeting Wall Street traders.

Verizon Financial Services is upgrading fiber between New York and Chicago and replacing routers, cutting round trip communications to as little as 14.5 milliseconds — 5 milliseconds faster than Verizon’s current network.

Why the need for speed?

To cut trading time to the bare minimum.  The Wall Street Journal reports that even shaving a few milliseconds off deals can mean the difference of millions of dollars.

As Wall Street and other commodities exchanges become increasingly automated, new opportunities to take advantage of tiny price fluctuations that occur over fractions of seconds can earn traders enormous profits from volume trading.  High frequency trading now represents more than half the volume on the U.S. stock exchanges.

Pricing for the new service was not available at press time.

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Smith6612
Smith6612
11 years ago

I wish that .5ms of latency mattered to companies to the point where they would make efforts to improve gaming and transfer latency for everyone. The latency on some of the routes I take on my DSL lines are just excessive at times. I pull better relative latency to distant hops over those nearby. Unfortunately for Verizon, my work’s network pulls better latency from New York City to Chicago than what they are proposing on their existing network.

Samp T Buggleman
11 years ago

Let markie post decide!

Paul A Houle
Paul A Houle
11 years ago

HFT is a rat race. Traders who make markets need speed because the first person to put an order in at a price that clears get the order. If you’re not the fastest, you don’t get orders, you don’t trade and you don’t make money. It’s not so much that you make more money by being faster, but that you need to be faster than the other guys. Faster trading is a social good up to a point, but I think most participants don’t care if the order clears in 2 sec or 20 msec. The only real drawback of… Read more »

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