Ultra-Low Latency Networks for Trading: The Complete Guide
From the speed of light in glass to microwave towers and hollow-core fiber: how trading networks are designed, measured and paid for — and what cloud-hosted exchanges change.
Latency Networks
Microwave, millimetre wave, hollow-core fiber, shortwave radio and subsea cables: the physics and routes of ultra-low latency trading networks.
Latency Networks: an overview
Price information travels between financial centres over radio towers, fiber and, increasingly, exotic media such as hollow-core fiber and shortwave radio. Each medium trades speed against bandwidth, reliability and cost.
This section maps the key routes, from Chicago to New Jersey and New York to London to Tokyo, and explains the physics that sets the theoretical floor for every latency-sensitive strategy.
Latest Latency Networks research
Browse all research Key concepts
- Geodesic distance
- The shortest path over the Earth’s surface between two points, the theoretical minimum route length.
- Refractive index
- How much a medium slows light; standard fiber slows it by roughly a third versus air.
- Latency budget
- The breakdown of end-to-end delay across transmission, switching, processing and exchange gateways.
Research roadmap
What we cover in Latency Networks
Our editorial plan for this section. Published guides are linked; the rest are in research.
- Live Ultra-Low Latency Networks for Trading: The Complete Guide
- Soon Microwave vs Fiber: The Physics of Trading Latency
- Soon Shortwave Radio in Trading: Beating Subsea Cables
- Soon Hollow-Core Fiber: The Next Latency Frontier for Trading
- Soon LEO Satellites and Trading Latency: Hype vs Physics
- Soon Far North Fiber and the New Tokyo-London Latency Map
- Soon Transatlantic Latency: Cables, Routes and Records
- Soon Chicago-New Jersey: History of the Ultimate Latency Race
- Soon Asia-Europe Trading Latency: Tokyo, Hong Kong, London
- Soon How to Measure and Monitor Trading Latency