Avelacom Shaves Latency Off ‘Flagship' London-Moscow Route

The latest improvements means the vendor can offer roundtrip latency of 35 milliseconds between London and Moscow. The project involved deploying 900 kilometers of terrestrial fiber and adding three new points of presence (PoPs) across Europe in Amsterdam, Bremen, and Helsinki. The backbone is connected to submarine cable operator Cinia Group's C-Lion cable in the Baltic Sea and Avelacom's fiber network in London The vendor launched the route in 2011 with a roundtrip latency of 37.1 milliseconds.

Previously the route went through Stockholm, whereas the new fiber-optic segment drives across Germany, using dense-wavelength division multiplexing (a technology used in long-haul optical fiber networks), enabling the vendor to utilize shorter paths, saving around 100km.

The UK PoPs are co-located in Equinix's LD4 facility in Slough and datacenters operated by Interxion in the City of London. In Moscow, the PoP is in DataSpace's datacenter facility──also the new primary datacenter provider of the Moscow Exchange. The PoPs are linked to the London Metal Exchange and Moscow Exchange matching engines.

The route is mainly used by market makers, brokers, hedge funds and investment banks that require low-latency connectivity and market data delivery, and are interested in markets in Russia, China, Japan and Hong Kong.

"Latency is a hot topic among capital market firms. Our recent upgrade cuts up to two milliseconds off [our previous roundtrip time] to help to support and optimize low-latency trading between Europe and Russia. It also leverages access to further markets in Southeast Asia, lowering latency to Tokyo and Shanghai accordingly," says Aleksey Larichev, managing director of Avelacom, in a statement.

Next year, Avelacom plans to open new PoPs in the Middle East, Africa and South America as part of ongoing geographical expansion plans.