Pico Introduces First Pure Optical Backbone Network Connecting Key Financial Market Data Centers in New Jersey

Capable of delivering up to 10Tbps of backbone capacity and 100Gbps of client access capacity

NEW YORK, LONDON – October 8, 2019 – Pico, a leading provider of technology services for the financial markets community globally, is pleased to announce the launch of an optical dark-fiber network with capacity of up to ten terabits per second (Tbps), initially connecting Wall Street liquidity centers Equinix NY4 (Secaucus), Nasdaq (Carteret), Intercontinental Exchange NYSE (Mahwah), and Cyxtera NJ2 (Weehawken).

The transition to dark-fiber is the latest investment Pico has made in PicoNet™, a private and proprietary global financial markets network that allows clients to excel in today’s competitive markets by providing low-latency, resilient connectivity to hundreds of liquidity sources, information providers and counterparties around the world.

Pico’s terabit per second optical backbone significantly enhances the profile of PicoNet, leveraging the combined power of the fastest dark-fiber routes available and the lowest-latency active optical equipment in the industry. PicoNet uses full ROADM functionality to route traffic optically between sites, instead of traversing multiple switches, reducing latency and operational complexity. In conjunction with its full suite of offerings, the core backbone capacity allows Pico to provision dedicated 100Gbps capacity links directly to clients. Together, this provides capital market participants with the highest bandwidth and most performant network to reliably deliver the enormous amount of market data required to make informed trading decisions.

“With ever-rising market data rates and an increasing need for global data sets, it is important to provide clients with a solution that allows them to keep ahead of the bandwidth curve and retain their operating edge.” said Jarrod Yuster, Pico founder and CEO. “We built this leading-edge network with best-of-breed and trusted technology partners to create a new performance benchmark for network solutions in financial markets.”

The fully redundant, resilient dual-fiber mesh network provides clients with the capability to access multiple data centers for trading and market data. This new solution offers abundant capacity to support growing market data message rates and data microbursts, and delivers improved latency and network performance by utilizing optical routing.

Pico has deployed Corvil network performance monitoring and analytics on top of this multi-terabit per second optical backbone, to ensure clients receive the industry-leading real-time visibility and intelligence that assures the speed, transparency, and compliance their businesses require.

“It is critical to have sufficient bandwidth to mitigate the risk of high volume, bursty data feeds causing excess latency and data gaps that result in poor outcomes for modern electronic trading strategies,” said Donal Byrne, Pico CTO. “The tremendous capacity available now on the new Pico optical backbone, coupled with Corvil analytics to continuously monitor and analyze the traffic in real-time, uniquely assures the quality, integrity and capacity delivered to our clients.”

The transition to a multi-terabit per second optical backbone for the northeast US markets is the latest step in a series of initiatives that Pico has undertaken to enhance the profile of its network offering. This latest innovation follows the launch of Pico’s global connectivity ring earlier this year delivering high capacity, resilient access to all major financial market centers globally.