Networking and high-frequency trading [LWN.net]

Networking and high-frequency trading

Posted Nov 20, 2022 20:06 UTC (Sun) by caliloo (subscriber, #50055)
In reply to: Networking and high-frequency trading by Cyberax
Parent article: Networking and high-frequency trading

Starlink still has a shot for over the ocean link. As long as the bent pipe is faster than the light in the glass pipe ...

As for advertisement of the possilibity to these guys : I'd think that starlink does not have to do any adverstisement to make a killing. I'm pretty sure the HFT industry is on permanent alert for new ways to communicate fast.

Networking and high-frequency trading

Posted Nov 21, 2022 10:28 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

As a bent pipe, it's no good - if you're in London, sending a signal to New York via Starlink, you send the data 550km to a Starlink satellite, which sends it 550km to a ground station near London. It then traverses the fibre route between London and New York, and at the New York end, gets sent 550km into space, then back to the New York station.

This is always going to be slower than cutting out the space hop and using the fibre directly. Where Starlink has the potential to get interesting for latency mavericks is when the inter-satellite links come into use. Then, you'd have the choice between a 5,500 km fibre route at 2/3rd c, or a roughly 7,500 km route via Starlink inter-satellite links at about c; the fibre route is roughly the same as a 8,250 km Starlink route, which gives Starlink an advantage as long as its processing and queueing delays are no worse than 2.5 milliseconds more than the fibre delays.

In practice, the HFT guys will probably pay for low queueing delay, so it all comes down to the processing delays - and I've not seen Starlink publish those details.