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.
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
Routing and forwarding traffic to other physical locations, aggregation of traffic to distribute to clients.
Provides a secure edge between client-managed environments and Pico-managed environments police traffic into PicoNet, can be scaled rapidly.
PicoNet™ is a global network. We maintain three regional network meshes in Europe, North America, and Asia. 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.
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.
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.
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 and colocation facilities.
Pico’s Global Ring 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. Pico is the only managed service provider to have made this level of investment in its network globally.
Clients can use a single set of network infrastructure for multiple functions
access to market data from around the globe,
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.
Our PicoNet™ backbone is fully resilient using diverse carrier routes. This maximizes availability and ensures that even in the worst of circumstances clients can protect themselves from losses by maintaining access to the markets even when their competitors are locked out.
We pass on our economies of scale to ensure better pricing for our customers in comparison to them dealing directly with individual network vendors.
Our long-standing relationships with the vendors ensure that they treat any service requests from Pico as a priority, which benefits all of our customers on our network however large or small.
We connect between Pico POPs in exchange colocation facilities using the lowest latency routes available, allowing seamless co-ordination of trading and risk strategies, increasing the efficiency of capital commitment and providing our customers with the best platform for global proprietary electronic strategies.
We offer full, uncontended bandwidth for all services to ensure jitter and latency is minimized and that every packet is delivered to give the most accurate view of the market and the best possible information for our customers to drive their trading strategies.
We manage the capacity on our backbone so that performance is maintained during even the most volatile market conditions, positioning our customers to profit when these conditions arise but equally protecting them from the risk of losses at similar times.
Our backbone is dedicated to the electronic trading community and has been designed for the security and performance standards expected by this community.
Our change management regime is based on the needs of participants in electronic markets and we operate strict maintenance windows to protect critical trading access during market hours.
We constantly review the telco market to ensure we get to access to the best available telco routes to maintain optimum latency and maximize resilience.
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.
Connectivity options
Pico offers flexible options for connectivity to PicoNet™ for access to market data and trading services which provide different capabilities and latency profiles.
| Layer 1 | 10Gbps server access via layer 1 venue switch | 5ns latency multicast market data – local markets only |
| Single hop layer 3 | 10Gbps server access via layer 3 venue switch | Combined low latency access to market data and trading services – local markets only. |
| Hosted layer 3 | 10Gbps server access through Pico Top Of Rack in a shared or dedicated rack | Access to global market data and trading services from PicoNet. |
| Cross connect | 10Gbps or 40Gbps access from client switch locally or from remote site | Access to global market data and trading services from PicoNet. |