The introduction of the 'dark fibre' technology is part of an ongoing effort by the German stock market operator to increase capacity and minimise latency for users.

Deutsche Börse Systems quadrupled the bandwidth of the Eurex and Xetra trading systems in December 2006 and introduced optional 2Mbit/s and 1 Gigabit/s connection types for Xetra in April.

Michael Kuhn, CIO of Deutsche Börse, says dark fibre will allow such upgrades to be implemented much faster in future.

"Our co-operation with euNetworks puts us in a position to realise changes requested by our clients within a very short time span," he says. "This represents a further step in the constant optimisation of the latency and efficiency of our infrastructure."