Network Connectivity
Pico is the only managed service provider to have made this level of investment in its network globally.
The PicoNet™ network has become the industry choice for connectivity to markets around the globe.
When we built PicoNet™ we only used the lowest latency switches, the fastest telecommunications links, and we designed for speed, resilience and scalability to deliver the best possible customer experience. The result is the leading global network of any service provider at the heart of Pico’s infrastructure, which supports our clients connectivity needs everywhere.
We support this with our state of the art analytics and monitoring platforms offering an unparalleled customer experience.
We designed PicoNet™ to be fast, reliable and scalable based on discrete functional tiers with the following characteristics:
A backbone designed to minimize the number of switch hops and processing to send data across the backbone between data centers faster than any other service provider.
A single switch platform across the backbone and data center environments, eliminating risks from interoperability, simplifying support and monitoring, and allowing rapid scaling of additional capacity.
Functional segregation of venue, core and distribution tiers, minimizing configuration and functional requirements for each tier, streamlining change management and allowing the configuration to be tuned to specific tasks so the switches operate in the most efficient and fast way.
PicoNet™ is a global network.
We maintain three regional network meshes in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.
The regional network meshes link the data centers in which Pico offers its managed infrastructure services connections to trading venues and redistributes market data feeds. We use the lowest latency paths available for the regional meshes, and we continuously monitor the telecoms market to ensure that we take advantage of faster routes as they become available.
AMRS
The North American mesh combines dark fibre with 40Gbps and 10Gbps circuits to provide resilient, stable and reliable connectivity between all the major North American colocation facilities where we operate.
EMEA
The European mesh combines metro dark fibre with multiple 10Gbps circuits, connecting the key London area colocation facilities to Frankfurt and the other major European locations.
APAC
The Asia mesh connects the main regional centers for electronic trading of Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo with resilient circuits and continues to grow as we expand our infrastructure footprint to new markets.
Pico’s global connectivity allows you to receive Japanese equity data in New York, hedge on oil futures in Singapore, trade the European interest rate curve from Asia, or trade FX 24 hours a day.
Pico’s global backbone provides the best possible platform for connectivity to market data and trading venues from around the globe and complements our comprehensive global infrastructure footprint.
Clients can use a single set of network infrastructure for multiple functions.
Trading either directly with exchanges or send order flow to executing brokers in other regions sending data flows between infrastructure hosted by Pico around the world for risk management, position keeping or proprietary trading signaling.
Network Architecture
Venue Tier
The market-facing edge where trading and data services which will be consumed by clients enter PicoNet, the venue tier only processes traffic for locally hosted services, and routes this traffic to the core.
Core Tier
Routing and forwarding traffic to other physical locations, aggregation of traffic to distribute to clients.
Distribution Tier
Provides a secure edge between client-managed environments and Pico-managed environments police traffic into PicoNet, can be scaled rapidly.
Benefits
Using Pico for your network connectivity gives you access to a world-class low latency trading network delivered by a single vendor, managed and monitored on your behalf, and freeing you and your customers to grow your business through your trading activities.
Our economies of scale ensure better pricing rather than dealing directly with individual network vendors.
Long-standing relationships with an extensive vendor network allow Pico to obtain priority service requests
Pico POP connections with low-latency routes provide our customers with the best platform for global proprietary electronic strategies.
We offer complete, uncontended bandwidth for all services to minimize jitter and latency, giving the most accurate view of the market.
Our backbone is dedicated to the security and performance standards of financial markets.
We manage the capacity on our backbone to optimize performance during volatile market conditions, positioning our customers to continue business at all times.
We operate strict maintenance windows to protect critical trading access during market hours.
We constantly review the telco market to ensure we get access to the best available routes to maintain optimum latency and maximize resilience.