Sell-Side Technology Awards 2013: Best Sell-Side Low-Latency Network ─ Anova Technologies

In 2010, months after its founding as a low-latency network provider, Anova began to investigate the viability of skipping fiber optic completely and building a wireless network instead. Wireless is known to be significantly faster than legacy fiber, but hasn't seen widespread adoption because of cost and reliability issues. In 2011, Anova introduced RFConnect, its millimeter wave (MMW) financial network.

But the Chicago-based vendor was not satisfied with that original version of RFConnect, nor was that version the one responsible for the Sell-Side Technology award. It suffered from the reliability concerns that plague all wireless networks. The model was switched to a hybrid of MMW and free space optics (FSO), the lasers of which can travel up to 20 kilometers, or 12.4 miles.

The FSO lasers and MMW radio frequencies combine to provide a high level of availability that neither can produce on their own. These two spectrums have mutually exclusive attenuation properties, making the system largely impervious to rain, fog and snow. Anova puts RFConnect's resulting uptime at 99.99 percent-a necessary number in financial services, where even brief downtime can result in missed opportunities.

"RFConnect won this award because it is the endgame solution of the wireless arms race," says Anova CEO Michael Persico. "It delivers ‘fiber in the air,' offering the ultimate solution for electronic trading: speed, availability, and capacity."
RFConnect's towers are outfitted with adaptive gimbles that allow up to 3 degrees of twist and sway, where most towers face an outage with anything over 1 degree. The wireless link has a bandwidth of 2 Gbps.

To back up its claims that FSO/MMW will displace other wireless solutions, Anova conducted an availability study to compare the performance of competing platforms over select financial paths. Using 165 million data points over 10 years of actual weather data, it concluded that competitor paths had availability ranges between 50 and 75 percent of RFConnect.

The FSO lasers and MMW radio frequencies combine to provide a high level of availability that neither can produce on their own. These two spectrums have mutually exclusive attenuation properties, making the system largely impervious to rain, fog and snow.

Anova plans to expand beyond the New York and New Jersey area into the London metro area in the third quarter of this year.

ANOVA REACTION

"We are extremely pleased to have been selected as the best low-latency network provider in the Sell-Side Technology Awards. It represents the culmination of many years of research and development looking for a way to deliver fiber-like availability through the air. Our RFConnect product involves deploying the world's first dual-spectrum, high availability, carrier-grade wireless network for the financial markets. It utilizes hybrid free space optics/millimeter wave (FSO/MMW) technology that is impervious to all types of inclement weather: delivering the ultimate solution of speed, availability, and capacity necessary for electronic trading. Our FSO/MMW service is poised to become the de-facto standard of the wireless industry, obsoleting all other offerings.

Michael Persico, CEO and founder, Anova Technologies