Microwave is only feasible over medium distances - can't do it over the ocean, as it requires LoS. Also IIRC, microwave bandwidth is considerably lower than fibre, and sometimes it matters.
Microwave is also affected by weather. They sometimes say that markets are slightly less efficient on rainy days. It’s a bit of a joke, but basically packet loss goes way up and they rely more on fiber links when microwave links are being shitty.
You still need to traverse physical segments in the wireless path: think receiving dish to the next transmitting dish, the end of the path to get from the trading systems onto the roof and into to the first dish, etc. Every nanosecond counts.
Comments
HFT uses microwaves for anything over distance. Unless this beats microwave latency, this doesn’t do anything for them fwiw
Microwave is only feasible over medium distances - can't do it over the ocean, as it requires LoS. Also IIRC, microwave bandwidth is considerably lower than fibre, and sometimes it matters.
Microwave is also affected by weather. They sometimes say that markets are slightly less efficient on rainy days. It’s a bit of a joke, but basically packet loss goes way up and they rely more on fiber links when microwave links are being shitty.
Traders have at least experimented with shortwave too: https://spectrum.ieee.org/wall-street-tries-shortwave-radio-...
You still need to traverse physical segments in the wireless path: think receiving dish to the next transmitting dish, the end of the path to get from the trading systems onto the roof and into to the first dish, etc. Every nanosecond counts.