StarHub launches Singapore's fastest network to support financial firms

Telco StarHub has launched Singapore's fastest network connection, up to four times faster than existing networks supporting financial firms and their latency-sensitive trading applications.

Called the Ethernet Low Latency Network, it will especially be a boost for high frequency trading and obtaining market data updates from trading venues. The platform offers a guaranteed low latency of under 1 millisecond round trip delay for the connection from their facilities to their equipment in the Singapore Exchange (SGX) co-location data center.

Kevin Lim, managing director of StarHub's enterprise business group, said the product was rolled out in response to the growing volume of trading and feed the demand for faster connectivity inline with other financial hubs.

For example, he noted the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) migrated to the "Millennium Exchange" trading platform since 2011, enabling trading speeds to reduce from average of 1.6 milliseconds to sub-milliseconds for co-located or "proximity hosted" trading firms.

In Hong Kong, the HKSE recently launched a new data center with plans to offer hosting services to Securities Trading, the Derivatives Market or access to its Securities and Settlement systems. This will reduce the latency within its trading community co-located within its data center, Lim said.

Lim elaborated the platform was built over StarHub-owned fiber network. "This network connects the buildings where the top financial trading firms are operating from, providing them with a dedicated and resilient network connection designed with full redundancy for their mission critical trading systems and data transmission," he added.

"We optimize the fiber route with the shortest path and faster processing network equipment to achieve better latency performance," he explained.  
The network also provides customers dedicated bandwidth scalable from 2Mbps to 1,000Mbps. This means they can subscribe for the exact amount of bandwidth needed, and avoid paying for unnecessary capacity, explained StarHub.

In addition, an online network performance portal will allow customers to monitor the link's performance such as bandwidth utilization, latency and network availability.