The POC represents a series of well-controlled tests executed using a new data compaction methodology developed by FPL's Market Data Optimization Working Group called FIX Adapted for STreaming also known as the FAST Protocol. The focus of this current phase is to demonstrate the effectiveness of the FAST Protocol on FIX market data message formats.

The FAST Protocol leverages implicit tagging, field encoding and serialization in order to radically reduce message size and bandwidth utilization. The POC has demonstrated the ability to significantly improve communication efficiencies for several real-world exchange data feeds without incurring material trade-offs in processing and latency. The FAST Protocol is based on the concept of data familiarity which allows greater speed and efficiency than conventional compression utilities such as ZLIB and GZIP.

The results thus far indicate that the encoding algorithm is fast enough to keep up with data rates well over 10 Mbit/second and in some cases over 75 Mbit/second before any processing latency is introduced. Testing activities demonstrated 81% to 94% peak compression rates with maximum processing speeds reaching 667,000 messages per second.

The sample data sets included in the initial phase of the POC are Archipelago Exchange's ArcaBook Feed, Options Price Reporting Authority (OPRA) Feed, Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Globex Feed, and London Stock Exchange (LSE) Feed.