Photo by: Duane Daws
Transporting financial data between global capital market participants and Africa’s biggest stock exchange is set to become faster.
On Tuesday, local data centre vendor Teraco announced a new 32 kilometre high-speed, low-latency fibre link between its Isando facility and the Sandton-based JSE.
Networking company Dark Fibre Africa (DFA) built the fibre link.
Brokers, traders, data feed providers and telecom companies will have faster and more efficient trading routes with the JSE thanks to the link.
“DFA has directly connected Teraco to the JSE with single route fibres allowing for less than 500 microsecond round trips, which is extremely fast,” Jan Hnizdo, CFO at Teraco, told Fin24.
“Effectively this has ‘virtually’ extended the JSE ‘meet me room’ into Teraco, thus allowing foreign and local capital market participants faster and more direct access to the JSE and vice versa,” Hnizdosaid.
Hnizdo also told Fin24 that approximately 150 telco companies that collocate within Teraco now have a direct access route into the JSE.
Teraco has a data centre presence in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town and is among the biggest providers of its kind in Africa.
Search giant Google and cloud computing outfit Akamai already tap Teraco’s data centre services.
Teraco is also building its second data centre in Johannesburg, which will bring its total ICT infrastructure investment to over R1-billion.
Meanwhile, the JSE is ranked among the top 20 biggest stock exchanges in the world.
In 2013, the JSE also moved its trading system from London to Johannesburg while implementing a new trading platform dubbed the Millennium Exchange in the Equity Market.
The JSE said this transition enabled trades to be executed up to 400 times faster than under the previous TradElect system while further allowing for increased liquidity and more algorithmic traders.