"It's a screamer," said Andrew Bach, the stock exchange's senior vice president of network services. NYSE's previous gigabit Ethernet network had a total aggregate throughput of .5Tbps. "We've been able to get our wire speed up to 10 gig sustained, regardless of packet size, and we've been able to drop our latency significantly.

The stock exchange, which daily executes tens of millions of trades for 1,200 broker-dealer clients, performed the multimillion-dollar upgrade in networks that are part of its existing infrastructure. The 10Gbps Ethernet was also built into two new data centers, one just outside of London and the other in Mahwah, N.J.

The exchange is in the middle of a data center consolidation project that would reduce the number of facilities from eight to four or five, according to Bach.

The 10GbE upgrade was required to handle the increasing amounts of trade messaging traffic, which is staggering. In the U.S. alone, NYSE exchanges process more than 22.4 billion messages representing $70.8 billion in financial transactions every day. The stock exchange said it handles about 7.5 times more traffic than the number of Internet searches that Google handles daily.

The stock exchange also sells market data to broker-dealers, which represents a large portion of its network traffic.