BSO to Launch Millimeter Wave Connectivity In Toronto

BSO is moving ahead with its planned expansion for millimeter wave (MMW) connectivity in Toronto, but the roll-out is being pushed to Q3 2020 due to coronavirus-related disruptions.

Fraser Bell, chief commercial officer for the network and hosting services provider, says the offering—which will replicate the service BSO currently provides into northern New Jersey and Chicago—is ready to go, but there are delays due to pandemic lockdown restrictions in the Canadian city.

“In real terms we are talking about putting people into data centers, installing equipment, getting people to climb up masts [poles for the relay stations]—all of that work we can’t do right now. So we are just waiting,” he says.  

The vendor has been working with fiber and Ethernet connectivity, but for firms needing faster connectivity, millimeter and microwave is the most appropriate solution, Bell says, as it can be up to 50% faster than fiber lines.

“In terms of the service to the customer, it is about bringing them the lowest possible latency or round trip delay, whichever way you look at that,” Bell says.  

The new service is a result of BSO’s acquisition of Apsara Networks, a supplier of wireless connectivity to financial markets. Following the acquisition, BSO has been integrating Apsara’s MMW and microwave technology into its network.

At the time of the acquisition, Apsara already had a footprint in New Jersey. Today BSO provides millimeter connectivity in what Bell says is a “triangle.” Nasdaq has a data center in Carteret, NYSE has a data center in Mahwah, and Cboe has a data center in Secaucus. BSO offers MMW connectivity that runs between Nasdaq and NYSE, the second connection is between Nasdaq and Cboe, and the third between NYSE and Cboe.  

In 2019, it built a new route in Chicago, delivering MMW services between ICE Futures, which has a matching engine and a data center located in Chicago, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s data center located in Aurora, Illinois. 

The next step has been to deliver the same connection between Toronto Stock Exchange Group (TMX) and Nasdaq in Toronto. Nasdaq Canada (previously Chi-X Canada) has a matching engine and data center located in Toronto, which will connect, through MMW services, with TMX’s data center, also in Toronto.

Since the acquisition, BSO has been making improvements to its connection points and services to improve latency, but because this is hardware technology, remote working is not as easy. “We have delayed some stuff right now due to Covid. Ever since we bought Apsara, we have been making improvements; it just takes a long time to do anything,” Bell says.

Michael Ourabah, CEO at BSO, says that compared to MMW, microwave is more suitable for long-haul connectivity. He says MMW can propagate up to 15 or 20 kilometers with the best weather conditions, while microwave can propagate up to 80 or 120 kilometers. 

MMW dishes cannot be more than a few miles apart from each other due to the likelihood of interference and weaker signal strength, which is why it’s not considered appropriate technology for long-haul routes. More maintenance, more installments, more latency—each hop adds precious microseconds—and possibly more tower construction. Instead, MMW is popular for use in metro areas where distances are short.

However, Ourabah says, microwave has one drawback, which is a lower bandwidth, usually 155 megabytes per second per channel. In comparison, millimeter offers the benefit of higher bandwidth of up to 10 gigabytes per second, per channel. 

BSO provides microwave connectivity, but Ourabah won’t give any names of exchanges using the service. “We do not really advertise that publicly, and we prefer to do so on an ad hoc conversation basis with firms interested in the service,” Ourabah says. 

In a previous interview with WatersTechnology, BSO’s head of Asia-Pacific said clients in the region have expressed an interest in microwave links; for example, from datacenters in Tokyo to the cable landing station in Japan. 

Bell says there are no plans currently to extend BSO’s microwave offering into Asian or other markets, but the idea hasn’t been ruled out.

BSO is also looking to build a software-defined networking (SDN) portal to allow customers to order connectivity, including specifying how much bandwidth is required, without speaking to a salesperson or having to send an email. SDNs allows operating systems and other software platforms to be decoupled from hardware, allowing for the rapid, virtualized provision of network infrastructure.

Orders on the portal will be self-provisioned without the need for engineers to get involved. Bell estimates this will be brought to the market “probably early next year.”

“We view cloud connectivity—connectivity between data centers that is not latency critical, just access—is something they should be able to buy from BSO via a portal,” Bell says.