Deutsche Brse has been offering all participants on the Xetra electronic trading platform four times the previous network bandwidth since the beginning of December. The current upgrade has boosted the bandwidth from 128 KBit/s to 512 KBit/s. The new network infrastructure also benefits participants on the Irish Stock Exchange, which uses Xetra for trading.
Deutsche Brse aims to increase data transfer speed and capacity with this upgrade. Round trip times, i.e. the time required for an order to travel from the client system, across the network to the Xetra backend and for confirmation of the order to be sent back to the client, has been on average cut by 50 percent. The fastest round trip time has been reduced to as little as 25 milliseconds.
The upgrade also means that the Xetra network is prepared for the increase in transaction volumes expected to result from the growth of algorithmic trading in particular. The proportion of automatically generated quotes and orders is already displaying double-digit growth, and currently accounts for approximately 37 percent of total Xetra trading volume.