Latency At The Speed Of Light?

McKay Brothers, a provider of specialty microwave telecom services to the low-latency trading space, announced it bettered its lowest known latency connecting Aurora, IL and Secaucus, NJ to 8.15 milliseconds. The company is ahead of schedule to reduce roundtrip latency to 8.12 ms on its Aurora-Secaucus path in the second quarter.

The low-latency race is generally targeting the speed of light. The speed of light between Aurora, IL and Secaucus, NJ is 7.95 ms. Latencies are quoted as round trip time, rack to rack.

The fractions of a millisecond differences attract latency sensitive trading groups, especially those hoping to arbitrage trade between the listed derivatives markets in Aurora to the currency, fixed income and interest rate markets that run out of New Jersey data centers.

[For more on McKay's race to the speed of light read: McKay Brothers Shaves Latency Off Illinois-New Jersey Colo Route]

McKay also lowered latency on its Aurora-Carteret path to 8.12 ms, with a 2Q expectation of 8.05 ms. According to the press release, these improvements resulted from an expanded deployment of Aviat Networks radio equipment. "Additional upgrades, route improvements and reduced serialization delay will drive further latency improvements this year as the company works toward its year-end targets."

Year end targets include below 8.05 ms Aurora-Secaucus and below 8.00 ms Aurora-Carteret.

Additionally, McKay has become an approved telecommunication provider at CME Group data center in Aurora. In the press release Dave Goebels of McKay Sales says providing the telecom services from CME to Aurora avoids an additional 10 microsecond round trip time between racks inside Aurora.

[To hear about how financial firms are managing their complex data architectures, attend the Future of the Financial Services Data Center panel at Interop 2014 in Las Vegas, March 31-April 4. You can also REGISTER FOR INTEROP HERE.]

In unveiling the updated 2014 US roadmap, McKay expanded their footprint, including westbound links from NJ to 350 E. Cermak in Chicago. In a few weeks McKay will allow people to inject data from Cermak eastbound to New Jersey at lightening fast speeds as well. New connections were also built between Piscataway, NJ (home of Currenex, an online foreign exchange system) with 7.98 ms latency from Aurora DC3 to the telecommunications company CentruyLink NJ3 data center.

"We have the biggest industry footprint," says Jim Considine CFO and head of business development and strategy in an interview. "We cover most data centers in Illinois and New Jersey, and although we have a few competitors on some routes we are mostly the fastest on every route and we certainly have the broadest footprint, and we continue to storm ahead." Becca Lipman is Senior Editor for Wall Street & Technology. She writes in-depth news articles with a focus on big data and compliance in the capital markets. She regularly meets with information technology leaders and innovators and writes about cloud computing, datacenters, ... View Full Bio