Avelacom Claims Fastest Nasdaq-Brazil Route for Data, Trading

Russian network provider Avelacom has created a low-latency route for market data distribution and order routing between Nasdaq’s datacenter in Carteret, NJ, and the co-location facility of Brazilian exchange group B3 in Sao Paulo, Brazil, ahead of a wider expansion of its connectivity in the Latin America region.

The new route uses 100% fiber cable undersea and overland and delivers roundtrip latency of 103.5 milliseconds between Carteret and B3. Avelacom CEO Aleksey Larichev says that this is faster than existing undersea cable offerings from Seaborn Networks and GTT Communications. In comparison, figures published by GTT put its latency over the same route at 106.7 ms. Seaborn did not immediately respond to WatersTechnology, but we will provide an update if one becomes available.

Avelacom began deploying clients onto the route in the second half of July, and will add new clients in a phased rollout. Most of these clients are US-based banks, high-frequency trading firms, and proprietary trading firms wanting low-latency access to the Brazilian markets, with the remainder being Brazil-based prop trading shops wanting access to US exchanges such as Nasdaq, CME, and the Intercontinental Exchange.

The vendor chose Nasdaq’s facility as its landing point because it also provides potential access to firms trading futures on CME Group, who commonly connect between the two exchanges via microwave networks, Larichev says.

Avelacom will serve as a telecom and extranet provider for international firms and local market participants not hosted in B3’s datacenter, and a market data distributor, providing normalized B3 data packaged with market data from other exchanges via a single API. The vendor will also carry trade orders between market participants and exchanges in each location.

Larichev says the 18-month project was one of the hardest undertaken by the network provider because doing business in Brazil can take significantly longer than other countries. The vendor completed its first point of presence (PoP) in Sao Paulo in December, and now has four PoPs in Brazil. He says the vendor needed to hire an undisclosed number of local staff, adding that it could not have completed the project without that local knowledge.

Brazil is the first step on Avelacom’s roadmap to expand connectivity throughout Latin America, Larichev says, though he declines to specify which other exchanges the vendor is in talks with about providing connectivity to their markets.