It connects nine major European financial centres via a high-speed, fully-restorable pan-European optical network. The newly upgraded network infrastructure enables the delivery of private line voice and electronic connection services over a secure, high speed service platform to support the growing demands of the European trading community.

IPC supplies communications solutions to more than 2,400 trading floors and exchanges across the globe and this investment in the backbone infrastructure technology will provide IPC's customers the most efficient connection highway to reach clients and execution venues across the region. The European optical network connects London, Paris, Frankfurt, Milan, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Zurich, and Geneva, with IPC's North America optical network, which is also being upgraded this year to meet growing user requirements. The new platform offers users resilient service delivery with self-healing re-routing capabilities of less than 50 milliseconds, should a connection go down and has been constructed in conjunction with multiple tier-one carrier partners to ensure maximum route diversity.

"This important upgrade will continue to drive forward our strategy to offer the most innovative and service-oriented platform to our customers, whose needs are continually evolving in today's market," said Dave Brown, senior vice president, Network Services Operations. "We continue to see a demand for new trader voice services as well as a growing appetite for real-time connections to facilitate transaction execution and liquidity access. IPC's customer service approach and ability to support quick access to liquidity with high service performance will help our customers to compete effectively in these challenging marketing conditions."

The Optical Network provides a flexible and scalable communications framework, and offers users improved service delivery times and connectivity to their trading partners across Europe.

The European network upgrade is part of the IPC's continuing commitment to its customers and follows the company's recent announcement regarding the expansion of its Enterprise Voice Service (EVS) into Hong Kong and Singapore.