McKay/Quincy Reduce Chicago-Europe Transatlantic Latency

Officials say QED's new transatlantic fiber capability, combined with McKay's low-latency microwave service on land in the US and across Europe, has enabled McKay to improve latency times.

The QED service employs McKay's lowest known latency microwave network between Chicago and New Jersey and its microwave network between the UK and Frankfurt, connected by transatlantic fiber. The end-to-end QED service offers one-way latency from the CyrusOne datacenter where CME Group hosts its exchange servers in Aurora, Illinois to Equinix's Slough-LD4 datacenter of 34.619 milliseconds (ms), 36.917 ms to Equinix's FR2 datacenter in Frankfurt, and 41.444 ms to Marseilles. This year, MBI has reduced the latency between Aurora and Slough-LD4, for example by over 400 microseconds one-way.

"The improvements are fundamentally about three things: First is about lowering our latency in all segments of that microwave route between Chicago to New York, fiber route New York to London, and microwave London to various points in the UK and mainland Europe. Next, it's about extending the capacity so that we can ship more data among a subset of those locations. Finally, it's about extending our network to cover more exchange locations or telecom-related hubs and specifically Marseilles as a telecom hub and Madrid," says Quincy Data and McKay Brothers chief financial officer Jim Considine.

The improved latency figures are a result of improvements across Quincy Data, and McKay's US and international operations, Considine says. "We also supplement parts of our microwave network with the best-in-class fiber that we can get. In this case, the latency improvements are really a result of all three-latency improvements on the McKay US route, latency improvements to the transatlantic fiber, and latency improvement on the European microwave side," he says, adding that McKay will continue to chip away at the latency figures. "It used to be a game of milliseconds, and now it's became a game of microseconds.... We endeavor to get to the speed of light, and we're pretty close.... We're driving very close to zero access latency as close as we can get on the mainland and hybrid microwave routes."

Officials say the QED service distributes market data from more exchanges than any microwave market data service. QED offers select data from 11 exchanges in the US and Europe. Most recently, McKay added equity index futures data from pan-European exchange group Euronext as a data source (IMD, May 5), and plans to add more exchanges in 2016. While Considine says he can't divulge which exchanges the vendor will add next, he says McKay is "in various stages of deployment and planning with new exchange sources in the US and Europe, and in Asia."

QED now offers access to all its US-sourced market data in the UK, and makes all Europe-sourced data available in New Jersey. Previously, "We used to take only a sub-set of data and transfer it across the Atlantic Ocean, and now all the Quincy data that is on our network either in Europe or in the US will be brought across the ocean," Considine says.