Telstra expands specialist financial trading network to Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo

Tuesday, 31 May 2016, SINGAPORE: Today, Telstra has announced three new point-to-point routes directly connecting the Stock Exchanges of Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo as part of its Ethernet Private Line Express (EPLX) service, which offers some of the fastest services available on the market today for financial trading companies in Asia.

Matthew Lempriere, Telstra’s Head of Financial Markets, said EPLX utilised Telstra’s extensive submarine cable network to offer low latency connectivity for financial traders and these new routes added to the existing Telstra EPLX network connecting with financial markets in London, Chicago and Sydney.

“The EPLX Hong Kong to Singapore route will be the fastest service available on the market and in a world where firms need to be able to execute tens of thousands of trades every second, every fraction of a millisecond advantage of can matter,” said Mr Lempriere.[1]

“We own the EAC-C2C submarine cable that runs directly between Hong Kong and Singapore, which we use to provide the EPLX service. Owning the underlying network not only gives us the ability to offer faster speeds, we have more operational flexibility to cost effectively scale up to meet customers’ demands.

“Network speed is critical, but reliability and flexibility are also increasingly important, especially as financial services companies themselves use digital technology to provide an ever more diverse set of products.

“Being the largest owner and operator of submarine cables in Asia, we can offer more diversity and redundancy to our customers and the ability to quickly identify and address any network issues. This makes EPLX attractive not only to financial traders but also cloud-based service providers and other organisations that need reliable, high-speed global connectivity for their mission-critical communications.”

“The combination of Asia’s emergence as the world’s economic engine room, the prevalence of ultra-high speed trading in financial markets, and Telstra’s unique cable infrastructure in the region and decades of experience in connecting customers across the Asia-Pacific makes this an exciting opportunity for Telstra. We are looking at adding more EPLX routes from Asia to North America by the end of 2016.”

EPL Express provides financial trading companies with a dedicated point-to-point service over the shortest routes between key financial centres to points-of-presence (PoPs) located in financial exchanges in these centres to minimise end-to-end transmission delays.

“Our customers are able to mitigate unnecessary risks with our comprehensive low latency Service Level Agreements and low Round Trip Delays, for example less than 30 milliseconds from Hong Kong to Singapore, and around 40 milliseconds from Hong Kong to Tokyo,” said Mr Lempriere.

“Telstra works with market leading partners in the financial technology space to provide end-to-end propositions from the network to the communications platform necessary for customers within the financial services industry to meet their business needs.”

[1] Expected latency performance based on RFC 2544 test result.