MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- cPacket Networks today introduced the world's first high-speed network probe capable of delivering highly accurate, one way distributed latency and jitter measurements at sub-microsecond accuracy, for networks operating at 10 gigabits per seconds and beyond. The probe, called the cTap Latency Probe (cTapLP), is a key addition to cPacket's cTap monitoring product family.

cPacket probes perform one-way, hop-to-hop, and round trip latency measurements in real time, and a centralized dashboard provides correlated results from distributed probes across the network, using state-of-the-art integrated time-synchronization technology. The latency monitoring solution specifically targets algorithmic trading platforms for high frequency trading – where latency can cost traders millions of dollars per millisecond, but also has applications in data center management, streaming media, and scientific computing.

In the context of high-frequency trading, network latency is the delay from the time a transaction is issued to the network, to the time it is received and executed at the exchange. It is also the delay between the time a price is sent from the exchange to the time it is received by the trader.

Latency can vary dramatically, from microseconds to several milliseconds – a range of three orders of magnitude – depending on the actual work load and network traffic conditions. In algorithmic high-frequency trading applications, this latency variability can drown out the competitive advantage that one trader's proprietary algorithms may have over another, and creates an exposure to latency arbitrage, hostile manipulations, and malicious attacks.

"You can't control what you can't measure,” says Bob Iati, partner at financial markets trading-industry analyst TABB Group. "And controlling network latency is one of the most critical issues faced by high speed traders today.” Iati explained that over 30% of buy-side shares in the U.S. are now executed by algorithmic trading platforms, and that latency as little as 10 milliseconds could cause a firm to lose up to 10% of its revenues. "It's a real, hot issue,” he maintains.

cPacket Networks Inc.