euNetworks Fiber UK Ltd. says they have deployed hollowcore fiber cable supplied by Lumenisity in a link between a data center facility operated by Interxion: A Digital Realty Company and the London Stock Exchange. The link will benefit from the low-latency properties of Lumenisity’s CoreSmart cable with nested anti-resonant nodeless fiber (NANF) hollowcore fibers, according to euNetworks, which plans additional deployments.
The Western European interconnectivity provider is the first publicly announced network services customer for the CoreSmart fiber cable, which Lumenisity unveiled last October (see “Startup Lumenisity unveils hollowcore fiber cables for DWDM applications, new funding”); the company has also supplied the CoreSmart cable to private networks. The hollowcore design avoids the impairments of conventional solid core fiber, which means signals can travel 50% faster than in standard single-mode fiber, euNetworks says. As a result, latency decreases by a third, enabling a roundtrip latency reduction of 3 μs per km. In addition to speeding transmissions over a given link, the cable also could be used to extend link distances while maintaining the latency of the previous link, euNetworks points out.
The reduction in latency will be of interest to customers of euNetworks’ euTrade portfolio, based on a dedicated network platform designed for the needs of the financial services community, particularly high-speed trade applications. The connectivity provider says that the euTrade platform is constantly undergoing optimization to shorten paths and lower latency.
“We continue to focus on delivering lowest latency services for our customers. We focus on identifying new and innovative technologies that can be deployed on our network to provide the best possible bandwidth solutions,” said Brady Rafuse, CEO of euNetworks. “We’re excited to be working with Lumenisity, helping to develop and deploy hollowcore fiber. We’re confident that with this technology we can achieve market leading fiber-based latencies much closer to radio frequency systems, without the constraints that are inherently present with those radio frequency solutions.”
“We’re very pleased to partner with euNetworks to enable them to provide the lowest latency performance to a major trading exchange using our CoreSmart cable,” added Tony Pearson, business development director at Lumenisity. “We are excited to be collaborating with such an established carrier and to already have hollowcore deployed, carrying traffic as part of this development.”
The deployment with euNetworks is another early example of the financial community calling for the latency advantages hollowcore fiber can provide. Similar deployments have occurred in the U.S., according to a December 2020 Wall Street Journal report (see “High-frequency traders using hollow core fiber: Wall Street Journal”).
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