A Bird's Eye View of the World's Fastest Networks

Low latency is of interest for a variety of applications. The most stringent latency requirements arise in financial trading, where sub-microsecond differences matter. As a result, firms in the financial technology sector are pushing networking technology to its limits, giving a peek into the future of consumer-grade terrestrial microwave networks. Here, we explore the world's most competitive network design race, which has played out over the past decade on the Chicago-New Jersey trading corridor. We systematically reconstruct licensed financial trading networks from publicly available information, and examine their latency, path redundancy, wireless link lengths, and operating frequencies.