Colt Lays New Fibre to Cut Latency on Two European Routes

Colt is opening network routes between London and Frankfurt, and Paris and Brussels, which it claims provide the lowest latency in the market and which are already attracting customers from trading firms. Leveraging optical fibre technology from California's Infinera, the London to Frankfurt route offers latency of 4.22 milliseconds between endpoints at London’s Poplar Business Park and Schmidstrasse in Frankfurt. The Malakoff (Paris) to Anderlecht (Brussels) route operates at a latency of 2.65ms. Both will be open by the first week of September.

Colt claims these speeds are ‘significantly lower’ than those associated with other services in the market and that they have been achieved by utlising direct fibre routes (along gas pipes in the case of Paris to Brussels) and applying specialised Infinera technology, which drives the company’s Fastnet Ultra portfolio of high capacity, low-latency Ethernet services, that were introduced early this year.

Terry Quigley, head of industry practices at Colt, says: “Our goal is to ensure we meet our customers’ requirements, so we invested in the new trading routes when we felt we were slipping behind the competition in terms of latency. The speed is the result of combining different routes and our technology. Latency of 4.22ms from London to Frankfurt is extraordinary, before we were operating at 4.5ms. “By offering these new, significantly improved routes and combining them with SLAs that guarantee constant and predictable low latency, Colt can take European traders to the next level of competition.” 

The pan-European connectivity provider says it has already signed up "between 10 and 20 customers" for the new routes, which are priced above its standard, existing routes between London and Frankfurt, and Paris and Brussels. Arbitrage opportunities between Eurex and the NYSE-Euronext-owned Liffe are driving the need for lower latency between London and Frankfurt, in particular.

In terms of competition, Colt competes predominantly against individual country incumbents such as BT, France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom. It claims its latency is a match for any of these, but competition is expected to come from bandwidth infrastructure provider euNetworks, also an Infinera customer, which is believed to be reviewing its European network routes.

Infinera officials suggest their technology offers a number of advantages over competing vendors. Bandwidth virtualisation is one, which allows the network capacity to be provisioned without tying it to physical optical cable strands or light frequencies, thus allowing network providers to offer more flexibility in their value-added services.

Also, Infinera's use of Fibre-Bragg grating technology to overcome the unwelcome effects of chromatic dispersion on fibre optic routes provides for lower latency than the deployment of traditional dispersion coils, which typically add kilometres of distance to physical fibre routes, so increasing propagation delay. As well as these technology approaches, Infinera also worked with Colt to analyse all of the components in the network, including amplifiers and digital signal regenerators, and minimise the latency of each, in order to bring the cumulative latency down.

Looking forward, the pressure will be on Infinera to deliver ever lower latency across Colt's European network. Today, by way of example, the London to Frankfurt route, which covers 861km, includes five optical amplifiers that add zero latency and two electrical regenerators that add nominal latency. But as Quigley confirms: “Infinera could deliver even lower latency. It could provide connectivity that hits the speed of light.”