The newly upgraded link reduces one-way latency on the route by 6.7% and sees the IaaS provider offer customers the fastest route currently available between both venues.

Today's announcement follows a busy start to 2014 for Options on the connectivity front that saw the addition of Quincy Data's Quincy Extreme Data ("QED") service to the platform, enabling the managed service provider to offer data at the lowest known latencies to customers trading across markets in Equinix NY4 and the CME, a March upgrade of the route between its venues in Savvis Weehawken, New Jersey (NJ2) and Equinix Secaucus New Jersey (NY4), reducing round-trip latency on the route by 36%, and, earlier this month, the upgrade and expansion of its managed server hosting and connectivity in Carteret ahead of eSpeed's migration to Nasdaq's main data center there.

The upgraded route between Carteret and Weehawken was deployed as part of Options' PIPE® Velocity services, a key component of the Options' Private Financial Cloud platform. PIPE Velocity is a low latency trading, FIX connectivity, market data and computing infrastructure, providing clients with lowest latency and highest capacity direct market access both locally and in key trading centres around the world.

"The dynamic nature of today's global capital markets demand that managed service providers continually strive to achieve key performance gains for clients. In what is often an end-to-end strategy, reducing latency remains the primary benchmark by which a company such as Options is measured. This latest upgrade further underlines Options' commitment to the continual upgrade of our network and our ability to assist our clients in achieving that most crucial of competitive advantages," commented Options SVP, Ken Barnes.