City traders to find their voices

Reliability issues have stifled voice over IP adoption on trading floors, but that might change

Flaky networks have stopped the wholesale voice over IP (VoIP) adoption in city trading exchanges, prompting BT to launch MarketPulse.

BT says its system lets "customers integrate data, voice and other multimedia applications through a single, highly reliable connection. The service allows customers to consolidate the many point-to-point connections that have been traditionally used to deliver voice services to the trading room."

Phil Mottram, managing director of radianz and trading systems at BT, said: “The market has been slow to take up VoIP services for the trading room due to concerns with its quality, reliability and security."

The system is based on the open Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)