Hibernia Atlantic and Sidera expand low-latency offerings

The low-latency market is all about incremental changes, and small differences between one provider’s offering and another’s can mean the difference between winning or not winning the business from the financial firms that use the services. As a result, the low-latency market is intensely competitive, with providers continually looking for new ways to enhance their offerings, as a couple of announcements from late last week remind us.

Hibernia Atlantic launches protection service
Hibernia Atlantic announced a protection service called “Hibernia Secure” for its Global Financial Network (GFN). And Sidera Networks announced ultra low-latency switched Ethernet services under the Xtreme brand name.

Hibernia Secure promises to automatically reroute a client’s GFN traffic to the client’s secondary route choice in the “unlikely” event of signal loss. Service would then be rerouted back to the primary or faster route as soon as that route becomes available.

Clients can choose an expected latency on key financial routes—for example 8.75 ms for the primary London-to-Frankfurt route, with 9.22 ms for the secondary route and 9.88 ms for the third route. On the company’s New York-to-Chicago route, clients can obtain 14.6 ms service for the primary route, backed up by 17.08 ms service for the secondary route and 27.5 ms service for the third route. The company also has other routes available.

“Hibernia Secure fills a need that existing protected services in the industry do not address: namely, in the event of an outage, existing protected services roll to the next available path, which could have a major impact on latency,” a company spokesperson said in an email to Connected Planet. “Hibernia Secure provides multiple low latency alternatives so that in the event of a network outage, the performance of our customer’s service remains at a high level.”

The company did not detail what, if any capability such customers would have used previously in the way of backup protection.

Sidera adds switched Ethernet

Like some other low-latency providers, Sidera Networks started out as the fiber network unit of a competitive local exchange carrier. Previously known as RCN Metro Optical Networks, the company now claims 60 financial customers for its low-latency Xtreme offering.

The company, which did not return Connected Planet’s phone call in time for today’s deadline, has added a low-latency switched Ethernet service to its line. The new service enables customers needing less than a full gigabit of bandwidth to use Sidera’s low-latency offering, the company said.

In addition, the carrier said financial firms will be able to respond to fluctuating bandwidth demands more quickly and efficiently.
According to Fujitsu, manufacturer of low-latency equipment, the amount of bandwidth that low-latency clients demand is increasing about 30% per year.