Sydney - Technology group Zeptonics said it had begun production of a switching device with latency of about 130 nanoseconds, which it said was the fastest in the world.

"Founded and largely staffed by former quantitative traders and trading system developers, Zeptonics was conceived to solve problems encountered during the principals' trading careers," the company said in a statement.

Founder Matt Hurd said the Zeptonics team was re-thinking traditional approaches to latency challenges.

"With hardware, for example, most network switches include features that deliver flexibility, but deny you the opportunity to aggressively minimise latency. When designing the ZeptoMux, our engineers stripped out all non-essential functionality and created a streamlined 'race car' device to replace the broad-purpose 'sports car' switches currently used by the industry."

The 130ns ZeptoMux is an Ethernet device that delivers a fibre-to-fibre performance that is the fastest on the market, the company said. The 24-port single rack unit appliance is scheduled for general availability in August.

Hurd said the ZeptoMux is designed to funnel messages from multiple downstream nodes to a single upstream service, and back again, as quickly as possible.

"That makes it perfect for co-located trading environments, and other speed-sensitive network scenarios," he said.

Zeptonics said it plans to deliver other hardware and software solutions to brokerages, trading firms, market operators, data centre providers and telco vendors. Offerings will include risk-protected broker gateways, network taps for security and performance monitoring, additional network devices, and bespoke consulting services.

The company said it is planning to release a 50-port layer 1 device with a latency of about 5 nanoseconds.