Equinix offers global access to High Precision Time from Perseus Telecom

Equinix Inc. says that it is the first data centre provider to bring High Precision Time™ by Perseus Telecom to each point of the globe. Perseus Telecom, a leading provider of high-speed global connectivity and Market-to-Market networks has deployed the risk compliant time service in the major financial Equinix data centres, further bolstering the variety of services that Equinix makes available within its financial services ecosystem. Financial firms collocated in Equinix data centres in North America, Europe and Asia stand to greatly benefit from this new offering, which reduces the costs of electronic trading through more efficient and cost-effective trade verification.

In the financial industry, time-stamping all trades to NIST (The National Institute of Standards and Technology) timing is a regulatory imperative. Equinix and Perseus have simplified this task by offering High Precision Time to Equinix customers in Chicago (CH1), Frankfurt (FR2), London (LD4), New York (NY4) and Tokyo (TY3). By offering financial firms a standardised method of time-stamping trades globally, Equinix enables them to more efficiently and cost effectively connect to the NIST time scale in Boulder, Colo. through the very data centres in which trades are occurring.

Equinix’s diverse financial services ecosystem, comprised of more than150 exchanges and trading platforms and 480 buy- and sell-side firms, presents Perseus with a rich pool of prospective customers. Companies wishing to use High Precision Time can simply request the service from Perseus, who can then set up a cross connect within Equinix’s data centres. Customers new to Equinix that come through Perseus’ offering can join the more than 4,500 companies on Platform Equinix™; discover a wide variety of potential customers, partners and service providers; and increase their reach through Equinix’s footprint of more than 100 global data centres.

With certified time stamps to sub-nanosecond accuracy, Perseus provides an objective measure by which to award trades that occurred first. High Precision Time can be calibrated to customer need with options to adhere to NTP (Network Time Protocol) and PTP (Precision Time Protocol). It provides companies an alternative to connecting to NIST through GPS or ingesting time across NTP over the Internet, both methods susceptible to disruption or malicious attack.

Perseus’ turnkey service eliminates the operating costs of time stamping for traders, including the purchase of stratum 1 atomic clock infrastructure, the network costs associated with connecting to NIST and the human capital required to man such a system and match trades on the back end.

Equinix and Perseus have a long-standing relationship and have jointly achieved other market firsts chiefly geared toward the financial services industry. Earlier this year, Perseus became the first to offer an ultra-low-latency, trans-Atlantic wireless connection between Equinix’s NY4 and FR2 International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centres. With a mere 67.68-millisecond roundtrip delay, the wireless connection bests the fastest fiber connection, also operated by Perseus through Equinix data centres, by over five milliseconds. Thus Equinix and Perseus enable the fastest wireless and wireline trades in the industry.

Beyond financial firms, High Precision Time benefits any industry that requires precise time stamping, including online gaming and app hosts.