The new routes are part of its Fast Trade service, which offers ultra low-latency connections for high-frequency trading (HFT) between European countries. Launched two years ago, the service gives direct access into 24 of Europe’s major stock exchanges and multilateral trading facilities.
According to Interoute’s commercial director Jonathan Wright, the company is also investigating extending the service to other cities such as Rome, Istanbul, Vienna and Moscow.
“Wherever there are trading exchanges, there is a need for low-latency services,” he said. “Amsterdam and Milan are secondary exchanges, but serious volumes of data are exchanged from these cities into the main finance centres of London and Frankfurt.”
By means of making bandwidth exclusively available for financial institutions, connections such as Interoute Fast Trade are able to ensure that latency remains stable even during the most volatile trading times. The service is designed to offer the fastest, most direct route between financial hubs, with the contractual round-trip delay of the circuits being measured before handover to the nearest 10th of a millisecond.
Low-latency connections for HFT were first pioneered in the US, which remains at the forefront of the practice, with low-fibre routes continuously being added in metropolitan areas. Such types of networks, however, are also increasingly becoming more commonly deployed across Europe.
“It is seen now as a common form of trading,” said Wright. “The technology is unquestioned, but it remains to be seen whether the appetite of the financial community to regulate it will hamper its progress at any point.”
