I was watching Elementary, season three, episode 20. The story revolves around a scheme to slow down the flow of information by four milliseconds so that information transmitted to another company, already using a slower connection, would have the upper hand in executing trades.
Over the years, companies have paid millions to straighten communication lines to make them shorter so that information could flow faster. By trading faster, companies could take advantage of opportunities that competitors could not.
When companies ran out of lines to straighten or make shorter, they turned to improving data switches.
In 2020 Wall Street firms were fighting over a cell tower transmitting in millimeter wave spectrum.
At issue is the new 160-foot-tall E-Band millimeter wave (mmWave) cell tower that NYSE’s parent company, Intercontinental Exchange Inc. (ICE), built at its data center in Mahwah, New Jersey, where NYSE’s electronic trades are executed.
ICE, through its data services division, provides the wireless connectivity between third-party data centers and the Mahwah, NJ, data center. Its new tower transmits in the E-Band, a slice of mmWave spectrum that sits between 71GHz and 86GHz and is ideal for carrying ultra-high capacity traffic a very short distance (typically just one or two miles). Such connections can be even faster than wired, optical networks because sending signals through the air can be faster than sending signals through glass.