About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Precise Time – A Data Centre Utility

Subscribe to our newsletter

Endace suggests the Commission should require any of these venues that offer co-location services to make GPS timing signals available to users of the venues at a “reasonable cost”.

This has already been advocated in an article I wrote for Equinix’s Winter 2010/2011 Newsletter. If you missed it first time around, here’s a ‘reprint’:

We’ve all heard about the “cost of a microsecond” and the “latency arms race”. The relentless increase in price and transaction data rates in electronic trading, and the drive to remain competitive, are forcing financial markets participants to invest in the latest technology to support spiralling bandwidth requirements and to drive down data flow latency. This has in turn given birth to a whole new industry in latency monitoring solutions, based on the premise that in order to manage something, you have to be able to measure it.

This evolution has now played out to the point where traditional measurement techniques are no longer sufficiently accurate. The latency of hardware and software components used in trading systems is typically quoted in microseconds. Measurement solutions must therefore have resolution and accuracy in the sub-microsecond realm. At TS-Associates we call this field Precision Instrumentation.

The foundation of Precision Instrumentation is precise time keeping. This means having access to an accurate reference clock and a means of distributing time synchronisation. The traditional network-based time synchronisation protocol NTP is no longer suitable. Better solutions such as PTP or various analogue signalling techniques are able to provide the necessary accuracy.

The universal reference clock in common use is GPS time. Each GPS satellite has an onboard atomic clock that provides a stable and precise time reference. However, access to GPS time requires that a GPS antenna be positioned with line of sight to GPS satellites – usually on the roof of a data centre facility. In any multi-tenant facility that permits cable routes to the roof, you will find many GPS antennae, one or more for each tenant. This approach is obviously neither scalable nor cost effective, and indeed problematic for some buildings.

Data centres are in the business of providing the essential utilities – space, power, cooling and connectivity. We propose that the next service to drop into the essential utility layer will be access to a precise time reference.

Henry Young is CEO of TS-Associates.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Enhancing trader efficiency with interoperability – Innovative solutions for automated and streamlined trader desktop and workflows

17 September 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes Traders today are expected to navigate increasingly complex markets using workflows that often lag behind the pace of change. Disconnected systems, manual processes, and fragmented user experiences create hidden inefficiencies that directly impact performance and risk management. Firms that can streamline...

BLOG

Regulators Hit Pause on Rules but Signal Zero Tolerance for Weak Governance

In an eventful month for global financial oversight, key regulators in the U.S. and EU have taken a pragmatic stance – extending major compliance deadlines while simultaneously trimming regulatory agendas. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) extended critical deadlines for broker-dealer reserve computations and private fund disclosures, withdrew fourteen proposed rules, and the European...

EVENT

TradingTech Summit London

Now in its 14th year the TradingTech Summit London brings together the European trading technology capital markets industry and examines the latest changes and innovations in trading technology and explores how technology is being deployed to create an edge in sell side and buy side capital markets financial institutions.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...