Perseus, Reliance Claim Lowest-Latency London–New York Network for Data, Trading

New York-based low-latency connectivity provider Perseus Telecom and Indian network carrier Reliance Globalcom will this week unveil a new trans-Atlantic network link that reduces roundtrip latency from New York to London and continental Europe to just over 60 milliseconds, utilizing Reliance’s existing undersea cable and new optical equipment from Perseus.

The vendors began the first stage of the new service, dubbed QuanTA, around 18 months ago, according to Perseus chief executive Jock Percy. This phase involved taking network traffic previously distributed across the six fiber pairs that comprise Reliance’s Flag Atlantic-1 North undersea cable, and migrating it to just four of the fiber pairs, leaving two fiber pairs free to exclusively carry low-latency financial data. Then, Perseus upgraded the laser and optical equipment used to beam data across the fiber at each landing station—where the cable comes ashore—on Long Island in the US and at Lands End in the UK, and optimized its own dark fiber backhaul links between those locations and its datacenters in 111 Eighth Avenue in New York and Equinix’s LD4 facility in Slough, UK.

Percy says the faster speed of the new optical equipment—which encodes and decodes the data into light to transmit via the fiber—is key to the improvements, as is the use of dispersion compensation technology that can re-focus a beam of light that has begun to disperse without requiring miles of spools of fiber, and the fact that Reliance’s network is relatively recent. “The newer the fiber, the lower the refractive index, and the further you can shoot light before you have to re-amplify it, which adds latency,” he says.

The second phase of the joint project—which is already underway, and which the vendor hopes to complete before year-end—will see the vendors reduce roundtrip latency to less than 60 milliseconds by shortening the length of the FA-1 fiber path itself.

“When undersea cables were originally built, they were built for reliability, security and cost—not for speed—so they go around obstacles, and avoid fault lines, underwater volcanoes, etc., whereas the perfect line includes most of the Northeast continental shelf… and would come ashore earlier in shallow water, which introduces man-made risks such as severing the cable,” Percy says. To achieve this, the vendors will introduce a switch in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean that branches off a new cable to an undisclosed new landing location via a much shorter route. And though the faster branch will have higher risk because of its route and use of shallower water, Percy says the service will be fully redundant because in the event of the cable being severed, Perseus can immediately re-route traffic through the original cable.

“Once we complete phase two, we will have the fastest and second-fastest trans-Atlantic paths without having to build a completely new cable system,” Percy says. Perseus has spent $10 million building the service so far, which—because this outlay is a fraction of the cost of building an entire new cable network—will allow the vendor to charge “a fair market price that reflects the much lower capital expenditure,” Percy says, though he declines to disclose the specific fees that Perseus will charge for QuanTA.