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Paterson Consulting

Low-latency trading infrastructure, sourced and verified.

Carrier-side solutions engineering, trading-firm connectivity and principal trading experience — in one advisor. Route design, vendor sourcing and feasibility work for firms where microseconds are P&L. The same buyer-side view now extends to the venues themselves: white-label exchanges and on-chain execution infrastructure.

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01The position

Most latency advice comes from one side of the table. Carriers sell you their route. Resellers mark up someone else's. Consultants who have never run risk optimise for the wrong variable.

I have built and sold these routes as a carrier solutions engineer, specified and bought them for trading firms and traded my own capital over infrastructure I chose. Paterson Consulting exists to put that full-stack view on your side of the negotiation.

02Services

Route design & latency budgets

Fibre, microwave, HF/RF and hybrid corridors, engineered against a stated latency target and failure model.

Vendor sourcing & negotiation

Direct carrier pricing benchmarked against reseller quotes; RFP design, term-sheet and SLA review.

Feasibility & lead-lag studies

Pre-registered methodology and kill criteria before capital is committed to a corridor.

Resilience architecture

Dark-fibre backstops, auto-failover design and MTTR-aware vendor selection.

Spectrum & regulatory sweeps

Licence-database analysis (FCC ULS and national equivalents) to map who is actually on a corridor.

Commissioning & acceptance

Build oversight, acceptance testing and handover to in-house teams.

03Exchange & DEX infrastructure

The same buyer-side view, applied to the trading venue itself: for teams launching an exchange, executing on-chain or deciding where to route capital.

White-label exchange sourcing

For teams launching a venue: vendor shortlists, setup and revenue-share pricing compared across providers, deployment timelines and the regulatory questions to settle before signing, including whether a shared order book survives MiCA-style rules.

L2 sequencer latency

Where Arbitrum, Base and other L2 sequencer endpoints actually resolve, which cloud region and peering path reach them fastest, and what that latency is worth once routing quality is accounted for.

On-chain execution & order flow

Private RPC and backrun-rebate integration with signing kept on the client's side, and order-flow analysis that separates a routing edge from a latency edge before capital is committed.

Perpetual DEX mechanics

Funding, mark-price, liquidation and market-maker terms reviewed by someone who runs systematic size against them: composite marks over single-source oracles, and funding that clears imbalance as a price.

Where a vendor pays Paterson Consulting a referral fee, the client is told before any recommendation is made.

04Selected work (anonymised)

Chicago → Tokyo, three tiers

For an Asia-Pacific proprietary trading firm, designed and negotiated a three-tier intercontinental architecture: an HF-trigger layer for the fastest signals, a consortium microwave/RF path for order flow and a fibre VPRN backstop — replacing public-internet transport end to end. Scoped the accompanying dark-fibre failover, a US metro wireless decision framework and a CME→B3 São Paulo feasibility study with pre-registered kill criteria. The engagement concluded by design: the capability was handed over to a full-time in-house hire — which was the goal from day one.

LON–NY · CHI–TOK · JNB–LON · NY–AURORA · CME–B3 · LON–HK–SG

Background reading: network infrastructure for low-latency trading — media trade-offs, latency budgets and the design sequence used on these corridors.

05Track record

  1. Paterson Consulting Ltd

    Founder. Low-latency network and trading-venue infrastructure advisory.

  2. Margin Syndicate Ltd

    Founder & Director. Systematic derivatives trading firm. Principal-side experience of the infrastructure this practice advises on.

  3. GTT Communications

    2017–2020

    Network Infrastructure & Trading Connectivity Specialist. Hibernia Express transatlantic system and Custom Connect microwave; trading connectivity for firms including Deribit, Flow Traders, Standard Chartered and Optiver.

  4. Liquid

    Solutions Engineer. Layer-1 optical transmission and the Johannesburg–London low-latency path.

  5. Level 3 / Global Crossing

    Solutions Engineer. Transatlantic and long-haul backbone including the fastest London–New York route prior to Hibernia Express.

CCNP · MEF CECP

06How engagements run

Study

A scoped, fixed-fee piece of analysis with a written deliverable and stated kill criteria.

Retainer

Standing advisory across sourcing, vendor management and architecture decisions.

Commissioning

Build-phase oversight through to acceptance and in-house handover.

07Contact

Engagements are taken selectively. Describe the corridor, the venue or the problem.

steven@patersonllconsulting.com