This should be understood as high frequency stock traders fighting for turf. One shop tries to access broadcasting bands to enable higher powers, thus, more reliable transmission, by multiplexing the payload with general purpose economic news - allegedly. Another HFT shop is trying to preempt this.
The race for speed in financial markets has reached a point where no existing fiber optic or satelite based system can compete; the state of the art are short wave radio that bounce back on the ionosphere and enable intercontinental communication at the speed of light over the shortest path and with no intermediary hops. Fiber optics, for contrast, can only do about 2/3 of the speed of light and impose non-direct routes and multiple hops.
I guess my question is: as an amateur radio enthusiast, why should I tolerate a special exception for THESE people to broadcast data if I can't even do something as simple as coordinate club meeting addresses in private over the airwaves?
Even if I saw HFT as a valuable thing (I don't), it's unfair to create a new exemption for these people just because they have money. And if you suggest that he government shouldn't be involved, then keep in mind the only practical force stopping someone from jamming these transmissions is the exact same government bandwidth allocation guidelines.
This should not be understood as an infight by HFTs. It should be understood as the radio waves of the world being a public, shared resource and folks asking, "Are we changing these rules now?" If so, it should be done equitably.
A HN comment in another thread (which I can’t find atm) states that this is no longer relevant because exchanges now allow colocation in the same buildings as the servers running the exchange, and it’s relatively inexpensive. Is that comment inaccurate?
That's effectively the opposite of shortest path. If you really want the best performance you'd set up a line of microwave links.. I'm not sure how much latency the hops would add but if you have fast enough gear, it's probably not enough to justify going all the way up and back down.
Confusingly, despite relating to encrypted messages, "DRM" in this context is "digital radio mondiale" which appears to be this: https://www.drm.org/technical-info/
Use of COFDM for digital radio in the current AM bands, part of the final AM phaseout?
There's no mandate for phasing out AM broadcasting on the HF bands, especially not in the US (where the use of digital radio broadcasting by any station is still completely optional at the discretion of the station and where there is no mandate to decrease or remove analog radio broadcast services).
There are currently no signs that Longwave and Shortwave AM broadcasts are going away here in the UK. If Droitwich Transmitting Station[0] can stay operational for another 14 years it will be 100 years old!
There might be a neat way to work around these laws...
Make all the data, including the financial data public. But make sure the people you want to see the data can access it first.
Arrange the data in the air so every error recovery block is mixed with financial and non-financial data.
Send the non-financial data out of band, and ahead of time, to your paying customers.
Now when a data block starts being transmitted, the paying customers can combine the non-financial data with the transmitted block (for example with xor) and decide to extract the data they want after just some proportion of the block has been transmitted.
The public have to wait till the end of the block to decode the data, by which time the data isnt valuable anymore.
I'm surprised that it is not possible in US to buy air time on commercial stations for exclusive use of the buyer and their customers. Surely it would be similar to buying an advertisement.
Here in the UK we already have data transmission over AM radio[0], nominally for remotely switching electrical equipment on and off but could be used for anything that only needs a low data-rate channel. I would not be surprised if the HFT people are using it.
"WIPE is suspected to be intended mainly for secret, non-broadcast message transmission for private trading clients while broadcasting financial and economic news for the public."
I’ve listened to a few shortwave industry experts hammer out the issues with this. Despite the novelty of the technical application this is an end run around the Commission’s rules. As there are other operators carrying out such data transmissions licensed under the Experimental Radio Service the major question is what exactly has changed in the rules to suddenly make this permissible.
When I am appointed Lord Emperor, I'm going to make capital gains taxes inversely proportional to the amount of time you held the asset. Oh, you just flipped $1M in 30ms? That's going to be painful come tax day.
So at what point does it become economical to use particle accelerators to send neutrino/pion/whatnot beams in a direct line through the earth between trading datacentres?
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange's data center is a stone's throw away from the Fermilab facility in Batavia (the same town where Parable wants to install their HF/HFT transmitter).
[+] [-] yholio|5 years ago|reply
The race for speed in financial markets has reached a point where no existing fiber optic or satelite based system can compete; the state of the art are short wave radio that bounce back on the ionosphere and enable intercontinental communication at the speed of light over the shortest path and with no intermediary hops. Fiber optics, for contrast, can only do about 2/3 of the speed of light and impose non-direct routes and multiple hops.
[+] [-] KirinDave|5 years ago|reply
Even if I saw HFT as a valuable thing (I don't), it's unfair to create a new exemption for these people just because they have money. And if you suggest that he government shouldn't be involved, then keep in mind the only practical force stopping someone from jamming these transmissions is the exact same government bandwidth allocation guidelines.
This should not be understood as an infight by HFTs. It should be understood as the radio waves of the world being a public, shared resource and folks asking, "Are we changing these rules now?" If so, it should be done equitably.
[+] [-] p49k|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] parliament32|5 years ago|reply
>the shortest path
That's effectively the opposite of shortest path. If you really want the best performance you'd set up a line of microwave links.. I'm not sure how much latency the hops would add but if you have fast enough gear, it's probably not enough to justify going all the way up and back down.
[+] [-] pjc50|5 years ago|reply
Use of COFDM for digital radio in the current AM bands, part of the final AM phaseout?
[+] [-] MrRadar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoofusOfDeath|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PoachedSausage|5 years ago|reply
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droitwich_Transmitting_Station
[+] [-] reaperducer|5 years ago|reply
I haven't kept up on the SW scene in a decade or so, so I may be mistaken.
[+] [-] londons_explore|5 years ago|reply
Make all the data, including the financial data public. But make sure the people you want to see the data can access it first.
Arrange the data in the air so every error recovery block is mixed with financial and non-financial data.
Send the non-financial data out of band, and ahead of time, to your paying customers.
Now when a data block starts being transmitted, the paying customers can combine the non-financial data with the transmitted block (for example with xor) and decide to extract the data they want after just some proportion of the block has been transmitted.
The public have to wait till the end of the block to decode the data, by which time the data isnt valuable anymore.
[+] [-] ClumsyPilot|5 years ago|reply
I am dubtfull this would hold in a court of law.
[+] [-] PoachedSausage|5 years ago|reply
Here in the UK we already have data transmission over AM radio[0], nominally for remotely switching electrical equipment on and off but could be used for anything that only needs a low data-rate channel. I would not be surprised if the HFT people are using it.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_teleswitch
[+] [-] jacobush|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] totetsu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smkellat|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grokhz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flerchin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kstrauser|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Google234|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcminter|5 years ago|reply
Sounds like the setup for a B-movie though...
[+] [-] joezydeco|5 years ago|reply
It's not out of the realm of thought!
[+] [-] alexpil|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexpil|5 years ago|reply