Comment by seabass-labrax
2 years ago
I'm curious to know where your towers were. Do you know if they still exist? Were your microwave antennae co-located on other operators' towers (e.g. those for VHF radio), or did your company have towers all to itself?
Without going into anything confidential - we had some of our own hardware, but generally rented capacity from firms like [0]. Some towers were custom built for HFT, some were shared with other types of users.
A famous blog post investigating some of the towers as an outsider, at [1], will be of interest to you.
If you want to guess where they are, get a globe, find the datacentres where electronic exchanges operate (it's not a secret: Chicago, New Jersey, London, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Zurich...) and draw the straightest possible lines between pairs of them. Microwaves don't cross the ocean.
[0] https://www.mckay-brothers.com/
[1] https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2014/09/25/hft-in-my-ba...
Is the microwave setup quicker than going through fiber nowadays? I only mean in terms of latency.
Traditional optical fiber has glass in the middle. The speed of light in glass is only about 66% of the speed in air, so microwave is always faster if you can get a reasonably straight path for both.
There now exists hollow-core fiber, where the light travels down an air gap in the middle, which is theoretically competitive with microwaves/lasers/etc. How much this is being used is a secret, but microwave transmission definitely hasn't gone away.