Network Services
Our PicoNet™ backbone is a key asset supporting our clients and our internal operations.
Pico has developed extensive commercial and operational relationships with telecommunications providers and network re-sellers to ensure that PicoNet is the fastest and most reliable Service Provider network available.
Pico Can Offer Network Services to Clients Through a Range of Options
Pico builds and manages a dedicated network for your exclusive use using our telco relationships and established support teams and systems
Leverage Pico experience, relationships and delivery excellence to deliver a dedicated network built to your requirements, simplify operations using Pico operational and monitoring services
Pico procures network bandwidth and hardware according to your requirements, building a dedicated network for you to manage and monitor yourself
Leverage Pico experience, relationships and delivery excellence to deliver a dedicated network built to your requirements
Overlay your connectivity on our shared network infrastructure
Rapid time to market, economies of scale, simplify operations
Key Services
By outsourcing their relationships with telco providers to Pico our customers get the following benefits:
Leverage Pico’s procurement expertise and knowledge of the best telco routes, you will always be as fast as your competitors
Pico takes care of incident management on behalf of customers, removing complexity and operational overheads for the customer, leveraging our status as a major customer to speed up the resolution of faults, and maximizing uptime which means maximizing trading time
Use a single vendor relationship with a common MSA to cover network services anywhere in the world, without the expense of setting up and maintaining contacts and relationships in different time zones and jurisdictions
IP Addressing
The use of proper IP space simplifies engineering, operations and change management. This reduces risk, speeds up delivery and makes your infrastructure more productive and stable.
Pico operates at scale and on a global basis and we maintain our own AS numbers which gives us access to registered IP addressing for use on our infrastructure. As a result, Pico can provide our clients with IP space for TCP or multicast addressing if they require this – from individual IPs to whole subnets. IP space is a finite and dwindling resource and therefore increasingly valuable, and essential for many purposes. Customer choose to lease their IP addressing from Pico and make use of it for their Pico-hosted infrastructure for a number of reasons.
Their own registered IP space may be restricted or reserved for corporate purposes
They do not already maintain their own registered addressing
It is not cost effective to separately procure a small amount of space for a specific requirement
Using a separate IP range simplifies engineering and network configuration
A separate IP address range can be used to enforce strict security policies and logically isolate functional or operational domains.
By using Pico’s registered IP space in tandem with our infrastructure and network connectivity our customers can simplify the design, delivery and operation of their trading infrastructure.
Timing Services
Pico has implemented our own resilient co-located clock sources across our network employing global architectural standards which ensure consistency and synchronization over PicoNet. We offer multiple timing services across our global footprint that leverage high precision & high performance PTP Grand Master appliances with Rb oscillators and Multi-GNSS options as clock source. PTP as a network delivered time protocol offers you resiliency in Grand Master clock sources and greater accuracy in time when syncing to the closest geographic source. We leverage our timing for our own market data capture, operations and analytics—generating a universal reference point for all of your timing needs.
PTP and PPS Use Cases:
Compliance for FINRA & MiFID II
Troubleshooting
Precise Market Data Time Stamps
Timing For Historical Data
Latency Calculations
Fine Tuning Trading Algorithms
Timing Details:
GPS connections are cabled directly to each Grand Master with cable length offset for a more precise time
The Rubidium(Rb) atomic clock hold down timer allows for max clock drift of 1μs within a 24hr period of GPS loss
Timestamps deliver level of accuracy down to the nanosecond
Client has the ability to integrate Pico’s solution for their servers using PTP-enabled network adapters
Pulse Per Second (PPS) connectivity available via coax cabling sourced from PPS amplifiers
Multi-GNSS options (GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, BeiDou, QZSS)
How to Connect
Connect in Shared Space via Pico’s Shared Top of Rack
Hosted clients in Pico space can connect to PTP and PPS via Pico’s shared Top of Rack (ToR) equipment which has been configured to behave as PTP Boundary Clocks. This deployment allows Pico the scalability to disseminate PTP to downstream hosts while protecting the upstream source. The implementation increases accuracy and minimizes additional messaging to the Grand Master. The Boundary Clock also provides a level of resiliency, in the event that all Grand Master clocks become physically unavailable.
Connect via Monitoring Services
In addition to monitoring the overall health and reachability of each of the Grand Masters, Pico has automatic alerting in place to proactively detect when clock drift exceeds our maximum threshold. These alerts are published to all of our PTP clients by our Network Operations Center (NOC) to notify them of potential faults they may encounter with their PTP clocks.
Connect via XC
Cross connected clients sync directly to the Grand Master for all protocol messaging. The Pico Grand Master clock will send Unicast “Delay Reply” messages back to interested parties who register “Delay Requests.” Clients may choose to directly register hosts or implement their own managed Boundary Clock with Pico as the source. (Clients need to be capable of listening to the IEEE 1588 standard Multicast groups for announce, sync, and follow up messages).