The Challenge
A high frequency trading firm operating between 350 East Cermak and CME Group Aurora Data Center experienced a critical issue during a scheduled maintenance window when both of their 10G wave services went down simultaneously.
The circuits had been purchased as diverse low latency paths from Crown Castle, but the outage revealed underlying overlap within the physical infrastructure. What was believed to be a fully redundant design was not actually diverse at the conduit and route level.
For a trading environment where outages can have immediate financial impact, the customer needed a complete understanding of their existing routes, exposure points, and alternative options available in the market.
Consortiv was engaged to audit the existing infrastructure, validate physical diversity, and help design a truly redundant solution while maintaining low latency requirements into CME.
Consortiv worked directly with the incumbent provider to obtain detailed route intelligence, including KMZ files and infrastructure pathing information for the existing services.
The routes were then reviewed internally and compared against additional carrier options across the market. The objective was not simply to replace bandwidth, but to identify physically separate infrastructure that eliminated overlap with the primary low latency path.
Using carrier route documentation, visual mapping, and multi-provider engineering review, Consortiv designed a replacement solution leveraging Lumen Technologies for the secondary path.
The new architecture provided true physical diversity from the primary route while still supporting the customer’s latency and operational requirements.
As part of the engagement, all routes and service information were documented visually and shared in a centralized format to improve long-term infrastructure visibility and provider coordination moving forward.
The issue wasn’t bandwidth. The issue was assuming the paths were truly diverse without having complete route visibility.
Aldo Sorrentino - Managing Partner, Consortiv
Following implementation, the customer disconnected the previously reported diverse circuit and migrated to the newly validated architecture.
The environment has remained stable since the redesign.
The engagement also established a documented framework for route visualization and provider accountability moving forward, reducing future operational risk and shortening the time required to evaluate additional carrier options.
- Identified physical overlap between supposedly diverse 10G wave services
- Obtained and reviewed provider KMZ route data
- Designed a fully diverse replacement architecture
- Replaced the secondary route with validated infrastructure from Lumen
- Created visual route documentation for ongoing operational visibility
Why Route Visibility Matters
One of the largest challenges in telecommunications infrastructure is the lack of visibility customers often have into the actual physical delivery of their services.
Providers may advertise services as diverse, while underlying conduits, entrances, splice points, or metro paths still overlap.
For organizations operating latency-sensitive or mission-critical environments, maintaining visual documentation of all carrier routes is imperative for:
- outage mitigation
- maintenance planning
- provider evaluations
- infrastructure lifecycle management
- future redundancy validation
Consortiv helps simplify this process by working directly with major carriers under NDA relationships to gather route intelligence, evaluate available options, validate diversity claims, and present customers with a documented, carrier-agnostic view of their infrastructure.
