This is now publicly available for download from the FPL website. Achieving yet another major milestone in the development of FIX Adapted for Streaming also know as the FAST Protocol.

The FAST Protocol sm is a data compaction methodology, developed by the FPL Market Data Optimisation Working Group, in response to ever-increasing electronic trading volumes and market data messaging rates. The FAST Protocol sm reference source code is being made freely available to ensure consistent interpretation of the FAST specifications. The availability of this source code is of great significance to the financial community as it includes the FASTAPI code set, granting users easy access to the FAST functions used to compress data streams. The release of the FAST Protocol sm reference source code is accompanied by supporting documentation, providing a well-structured description of the code. Included in the release pack are basic examples for encoding and decoding using a set message template. The FAST Protocol sm leverages implicit tagging, field encoding and serialisation in order to radically reduce message size and bandwidth utilisation reducing FIX data feeds by up to 90%.

Having received significant support from leading industry innovators it is expected that the FAST Protocol sm will enjoy wide adoption in the marketplace, presenting a major opportunity for the financial community as a whole to improve the effectiveness of its technology infrastructure.

Mark Langley, Product Manager for Information Services at the London Stock Exchange said "We are committed to providing more choice and flexibility to our customers through initiatives such as the FAST protocol. The reference code will be used as the the basis of our own pilot implementation to prove the benefits of FAST. As a leading exchange that has adopted .NET extensively there is a natural fit between the Rapid Addition C# port and our Infolect market data feed."

Paul Foley of Microsoft said "This is an important step forward for the Microsoft community wishing to use FAST. The fact that the C# performed as well as the native C implementation is particularly encouraging as it allows people to use a managed language, with its simplicity and without any performance costs."