The race to zero (or more accurately c) on the networking front is seeing significant action, largely because it's the "lowest hanging fruit." Network latency is six to eight orders of magnitude higher than processing latency in most case. By Amdahl's Law, it's a very good system to optimize. This is especially true for places like Korea, and for the US where there's significant geographic distance between futures and equities.
Microwave is an "early adopter" technology that will soon be replaced with superior ones. The first microwave network was slated to cost 15M/yr at the time of its launch in 2012. However, competition dropped that number to around 2M by launch time, and within six months it was < 250K. Mind you, everyone was locked into a 1-2yr contract at the higher price points. For the U.S. Tradeworx (aka Thesys) is one of the fastest "publicly" available networks so they're commanding a premium at $250K, but microwave is now available for less than 80K a mere two years after launch. Same story for Spread - seven figures and a two year commitment at the time of launch, down to 15-60K.
On days with snow, rain, or wind kicking up pollen/dust, packets are dropped at comical rates. Dropping a packet is more expensive latency wise than sending it over Spread, and if the weather is bad enough, you're not getting anything through at all, which leads to dual Spread/microwave deployments. Spread knows this which is why the introduction of microwave didn't dramatically drop the price of Spread.
Bandwidth wise you used to get about 1.5Mbps over a shared link. That number is better now, but not substantially. Even with no loss there's barely enough bandwidth to carry L1 price updates on a single active market data symbol, so market data on the whole is a no go. From what I can tell most people have gone the route of transmitting many types of data over both fiber and microwave while leaving the responsibility of deduping to the receiver.
There's not much coverage on it but we'll see some interesting things on the fiber front soon. Photonic-crystal fiber is getting cheaper and we'll continue to see interesting advances on the hollow-core photonic-bandgap front in general [1]. These technologies can theoretically get very close to the speed of light (.997c) with extremely high bandwidth and low attenuation (repeaters in either fiber or microwave networks add significant latency) at which point the race to zero will stair step down again.
Microwave is an "early adopter" technology that will soon be replaced with superior ones. The first microwave network was slated to cost 15M/yr at the time of its launch in 2012. However, competition dropped that number to around 2M by launch time, and within six months it was < 250K. Mind you, everyone was locked into a 1-2yr contract at the higher price points. For the U.S. Tradeworx (aka Thesys) is one of the fastest "publicly" available networks so they're commanding a premium at $250K, but microwave is now available for less than 80K a mere two years after launch. Same story for Spread - seven figures and a two year commitment at the time of launch, down to 15-60K.
On days with snow, rain, or wind kicking up pollen/dust, packets are dropped at comical rates. Dropping a packet is more expensive latency wise than sending it over Spread, and if the weather is bad enough, you're not getting anything through at all, which leads to dual Spread/microwave deployments. Spread knows this which is why the introduction of microwave didn't dramatically drop the price of Spread.
Bandwidth wise you used to get about 1.5Mbps over a shared link. That number is better now, but not substantially. Even with no loss there's barely enough bandwidth to carry L1 price updates on a single active market data symbol, so market data on the whole is a no go. From what I can tell most people have gone the route of transmitting many types of data over both fiber and microwave while leaving the responsibility of deduping to the receiver.
There's not much coverage on it but we'll see some interesting things on the fiber front soon. Photonic-crystal fiber is getting cheaper and we'll continue to see interesting advances on the hollow-core photonic-bandgap front in general [1]. These technologies can theoretically get very close to the speed of light (.997c) with extremely high bandwidth and low attenuation (repeaters in either fiber or microwave networks add significant latency) at which point the race to zero will stair step down again.
http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v7/n4/full/nphoton.201...