It was an "exceptional" inquiry because of the scale of the disaster, the number of countries involved and the difficulty of locating the plane's data recorders, he said.
The companies are forming the Global Internet Speedup initiative, a new system for sending data on the Internet to end users faster by locating generally where in the world end users are.
Some trading firms measure their competitiveness by the speed in which they can connect to financial exchanges and complete transactions, and even at the speed of light that data travels along the glass of fiber optic lines, locating even a few miles closer to the exchange could provide an edge.