Avelacom Slashes London-Tokyo Latency in Push to Become ‘Leading Asia-Pac Player’

Moscow-based low-latency network provider Avelacom has gone live with what it claims is the fastest connectivity between London and Tokyo, as part of an initiative to rewrite the latency rules into and within the Asia-Pacific region by optimizing existing network routes with segments of proprietary fiber to significantly reduce latency.

The new route connects Equinix’s LD4 and LD5 datacenters outside London to a new point of presence in Equinix’s TY3 IBX datacenter in Tokyo, with roundtrip latency of 145.3 milliseconds (ms), which officials say is 10ms faster than the fastest existing route between London and Tokyo.

The new route utilizes third-party networks, but uses proprietary Avelacom fiber between existing network points to optimize the route.  “We saw an opportunity… to optimize some of the routes and build something that would give us the leading route and be faster than anything else on the market,” says Avelacom managing director Aleksey Larichev.  “We are the owners of that underlying infrastructure, so if someone wants to beat this route, they would have to dig their own fiber routes.”

In addition, Larichev says there is still scope for additional latency improvements on the London-Tokyo route, and plans to provide the lowest-latency connectivity covering other routes in the region in the near future.

Larichev says the project took more than a year to complete, and that the choice of location in Equinix datacenters was driven by client demand—primarily driven from FX market participants, but the vendor anticipates it will also be used by equities and cryptocurrency market participants.

 “Our strategy is to become the leading player in the Asia-Pacific region right now. That’s why we recently opened an office in Singapore and are hiring salespeople there,” he says. “Singapore is pushing development of the foreign exchange markets, and players in established markets are looking for exposure to new markets in Asia Pacific. So we are trying to focus on these developing capital markets.”