We've had ATT@Home for more than a year and reliability has been very very good -- only 3 outages in that time.
Tom_P for your budget why not get DSL and cable as a backup. If one goes down have a router switch to the other. This should be well in your budget and solve most problems. Have Cable provide your quotes and trade off DSL if one goes down you won't be left holding the bag. I'd go with the 59.99 option and have a cable line for quotes. I think you would be pretty happy with that setup rtharp
jmcgraw, Cost is not related to reliability. I used to live in the "not so sunny" Pacifica, and traded stocks using ISDN. Apparently the folks who run and live in Pacifica were two busy going to tractor-pull contests rather than have DSL or @Home around there. ISDN is very costly but as the only choice around was highly unreliable and I have had outages often !!! It sucks to pay $200 and the provider takes you for a moron, money bag. I don't need reliability that much now anyway, I am not a daytrader but like to have bandwidth. If anyone needs I have a great ISDN 4port switch for sale ! (made by 3com - you can have 4 pc running off it) i will make a deal !!!!!!! e-mail to anagy@caiso.com
rtharp, thanks, that's an interesting idea which I never thought about. I have access to pretty good cable service in our building. Like everyone else (see title of this thread), I always thought in terms of DSL or cable, but using both could give me some extra flexibility. Tom
To update - I've acquired the Adelphia cable so far with pretty good results. Have 2 machines networked off a Netgear switch, with my server machine running Sygate Home Network. The cable can certainly handle the data stream, although I suspect Adelphia's backbone is not of the highest quality as pings are sometimes not great. Outages have averaged only several per week, usually not more than several minutes at a time. Installation of the service was very easy. My server machine is also set up to dial Earthlink via a 56K modem should the cable fail. I feel Earthlink dial-up service is excellent as a backup. My biggest problems relate to running IB behind a firewall. Even when the ports are open to IB (and I'm no techie so I may not be doing this correctly), quotes can be bad. QCharts seems to run fine behind the Sygate's NAT function, but I cannot get NexTrend to run on either the server or the client machine. IB seems to be healthy, at least the old TWS which I still use, when run from the server. Something to keep in mind for those of you considering the networked route.
I'm running a NAT setup (Zyxel Prestive 642R ADSL router) and have no problems whatsoever running IB TWS (verions 3 and 4, locally installed as well as from their server) and Nextrend.
Hi Guys. I'm running a T1 line for all my internet connection. The costs are outrageous, almost $1000/mo. I'm thinking of switching to ATT cable modem. I use this line for quotes and charts only, execution is done on another line. Any comments or suggestions regarding how that will compare with my current situation. The cost will be $50 for ATT cable vs. $1000 for the T1. Plus to mention T1 is not that great and has outages once a month. Thank you, I appreciate your help in advance, unfortunatelly I'm not very technology savvy.
Predictor, go with what rtharp said on 5/13/01 about both cable and DSL, It beats the $1000 for T1. Having both cable and DSL will cost you about $850 less and will definitely be more advantageous. If you are only going to get one or the other, I rec. DSL b/c of the cable "bottleneck" effect.
MktSkills thanks you are absolutely right. I could get both, eventhough not sure if there is a way to have one automatically turn on if the other one goes down? Is that possible? Thanks
I think it is possible to have both and automatically switch. That is, if one is really out of order, it should switch automatically. But I am not sure, this is not my config. I am sure about having Cable [with a linksys router] and simple modem as a backup. When one fails [very rare I must say], it is easy to activate the dial up connection. All applications will then use the new route without any particular action on your side. This is the basis to assume the same with DSL and Cable both active. But this should be confirmed by someone with such a config. vpiNeo