Hi ftth.
I remember those earlier discussions well, some of them dating back to the days of the Last Mile Technology Thread during the late nineties. As for the low-latency trading space, there have always been firms, going back to the sixties, that use rooftop- and window- based microwave in the financial securities sector. I suspected, a while ago, that if anyone was using RF for its latency characteristics they'd pretty much have an incentive it keep it to themselves, given the competitive advantage they'd lose by boasting about it. It kinda makes it hard for those who are not good at containing the urge to brag, but given the stakes, but the tradeoffs for keeping the matter steeped in stealth is probably well worth it. Or, at least it 'was', until now :)
A little over a year ago, IIRC, I posited this assertion (which your reference article details nicely) in an off-list (PM) discussion with a fellow board member here in nFCTF (who is free to step forward on his own if he chooses) and proceeded to run the numbers per the coefficients outlined here: tinyurl.com . The results unsurprisingly supported the thesis.
One of the interesting aspects about this, from my perspective, is the siting of surrogate/satellite/virtually-colocated data centers along corridors that tie together urban trading centers and the data centers of the primary exchanges. It recalls how towns and trader posts were built along railroad tracks, rivers, etc., but didn't necessarily have to be so if wireless were used instead of fiber.
Interestingly, today this presents a new kind of problem, a paradox, if you will, and that is the RF "path" congestion on those same corridors connecting data centers that might not have been located where they now exist if wireless had remained a dominant or equally utilized part of the mix. The primary data centers, too, are either initially situated along existing fiber routes, I should add, or their very existence in a given location becomes the impetus for building more fiber routes to them.
Of course, most pundits/journalists/practitioners believe the myths they spew, and there is no greater myth in our space today than the belief that fiber offers communications at the speed of light.
FAC
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