BT Preps High-Bandwidth US Data Net

BT is building the network in response to continued and anticipated future rises in the capacity of datafeeds—from typically 2 Megabits per second a decade ago to 10 Gigabits per second today, likely rising to 20Gbps in the future, says Yousaf Hafeez, head of business development at BT Financial Technology Services. If this trend continues, firms wishing to access market data may either have to build their own networks or share infrastructure with other consumers, he adds.

“We were being told by our customers in the US that year-on-year, the amount bandwidth they require for market data is growing phenomenally. One of our customers is forecasting, between now and January 2018... a 40 percent increase in bandwidth,” he says. “You can’t be in a position where you’re putting infrastructure in place which is great today, but when the bandwidth increases in six months’ time, you’re struggling.”

But this increase in the bandwidth required to access market data feeds has led to both rising connectivity costs to access the data and increased costs associated with processing datafeeds.

To address these challenges, Hafeez says BT has created a “very high-bandwidth capacity” network, initially connecting six datacenters where it had an existing presence—350 East Cermak Road and 725 South Wells Street in Chicago, and Equinix’s NY4 datacenter at 755 Secaucus Road in Secaucus, NJ, BT’s own datacenter at 492 River Road in Nutley, NJ, 165 Halsey Street in Newark, and 111 Eighth Avenue in New York—though he declines to provide specific figures for bandwidth and latency.

“Putting in this large bandwidth in place now will allow customers to access any datafeed in the US they want to at any bandwidth they require,” while giving customers the flexibility to increase bandwidth as the size of the datafeed increases, Hafeez says. While declining to specify how much BT will charge, he says it will offer a “significant” cost saving over self-build solutions as BT will be sharing infrastructure between customers. Hafeez says BT is working with other carriers to build the infrastructure, and will purchase capacity between the datacenters based on which vendors can deliver the best latency and availability.

Though unable to give specific latency figures yet, Hafeez says the key aspect of the network is to deliver predictable latency that is “consistent throughout the day, so it doesn’t come in peaks and troughs. What we’re saying to our customers is ‘Come to us if you want a low-latency solution, but the key benefit is the consistency throughout the day’.”

Hefeez describes the network as “the next step up” from—rather than a replacement for—BT’s existing Radianz Cloud connectivity network, and will “allow us to carry datafeeds which other networks may find a challenge to carry as datafeeds go from 10 Gbps to 40Gbps.” The network can be and can be linked to Radianz Cloud so clients can access datafeeds from other regions, such as feeds from Deutsche Börse or the Singapore Exchange.

The US has seen the biggest rise in bandwidth requirements because it has the largest volumes and the largest markets. “The US is about two to three years ahead of other regions in terms of bandwidth consumption,” Hafeez says. And while bandwidth levels in Europe and Asia haven’t reached the same as those in the US, the vendor expects them to rise and will look to create similar networks in Europe and Asia to support the increases. “There’s no reason why we can’t do this in other regions. The only reason we’re not doing this is Europe or Asia at the moment is simply you don’t have the same bandwidth challenges as you have in the US,” he adds.

BT began the network project in June. The first phase of building the infrastructure is now almost complete, while the second will be to onboard customers into a production environment on the network.

Hafeez says the network will be “ready to go” within the next few weeks. “We have customers today testing the service, and we will now be moving those customers onto a production system environment.... The target is to get the first customers connected towards October time,” he says. “Then, if customers want us to build this out to other datacenters, that’s not a problem. We started with these six because those were the datacenters customers were demanding. It would take a matter of weeks to add more.”