Tell us about this new wireless route and which firms stand to benefit?
Our new wireless routes will connect Bergamo in Italy and THN2 in London to Frankfurt and the wider London metro area. Our current offering already connects Basildon, Slough and Frankfurt. All our routes, whether they are existing or new, leveraging purpose-built wireless networks which are engineered to offer competitive latency.
The market data packages offered by ICE over wireless include a wide range of cash equity and future instruments from the main European venues. Firms trading European stocks or fixed income can benefit from this offering.
How are smaller trading firms benefitting from access to low-latency trading via these new commercialized wireless routes?
This offering is built to be accessible to the wider trading community. We want smaller firms to benefit from wireless technology without having to make significant investments or long-term commitment. Our goal at ICE is to allow those customers to compete with historical wireless players who’ve been using the technology for many years already.
In addition to the obviously latency benefit, the ICE solution includes a comprehensive fiber backup to maximize customer uptime, and it also uses a single protocol across our worldwide offering which simplifies integration and improves time to market.
What do these developments mean for the competitive landscape?
It means more people can access technology that’s traditionally considered premium, and it enables them to get a latency edge. Customers now have another choice of wireless provider to all the key European exchanges, which was not really the case before. As usual, more competition always benefits the client.