well most internet connections are rather robust compared to 1999 when i started trading. However, the larger you trade the more significant the power of your connection is. Going down for a few minutes while not a tragedy can make the difference at the times when you are closing trades or putting them on. I have traded over all types, a hard wired t1 is has always been the best but even they go down. so will your firms and clearing firms servers. People used to pay for direct lines installed into home or office, im not sure if the internet has overtaken that. I think most of the firms in NYC and Chicago have direct lines. I think the bottom line is that the larger your leverage and shorter your trade timeframe, the more you shoudl spend on an internet or direct line to the marketplaces.
you dont need a t1 anymore just use this software or something like this http://josh.com/teepipe/index.htm and use several el cheapo cable or DSL connections. better speed, better reliability, lower price.
If you have a cable internet provider, go with them. Cable is around 3Mbps, whereas T1 is only 1.5Mbps.
I have cable, has been out 5 minutes in the last year and pings my broker in 25 ms. T1 is no better. I pay $40 a mo.
I currently have a T1 and it costs me $325 per month, which I thought was a great deal when I did it 2 years ago. Obviously I love it because its super fast and rock solid. It has never gone out on me once since I've had it (at least not that I've noticed). But I think if I were to move, I wouldn't get another one at this point. I think would prefer to have cable modem AND dsl together. From my experience, neither one of them are reliable enough by themselves, but very rarely are they both out at the same time. Obviously its more fault tolerant than a T1 because you've eliminated a single failure point.
T1 will give you better latency in a lot of cases from you to the exchange, but it's most likely negligible unless you are scalping and/or trading a lot of size. If you go that route get a point to point T-1 to your broker, which is distance $$$ sensitive. I think this has been covered before so search. Maybe you should tell what you are trying to do? Are you a high frequency scalper trading size? If so T1 may help. If not probably not a big deal unless you high speed residential options are poor. If you download pingplotter dot com and ping a server close to your broker, depending on where you live, you should be under 90 milliseconds, if in the continental US. I just checked and from Denver to Chicago I am 50 today, but avg. around 6-80 which is fine. If you are in Europe pinging to America you might be 200-300 milliseconds which is normal. The big auto bots collocate at the exchanges to make latency next to zero and prevent the # of hops your ISP routes traffic. One other advantage of T1, and I used to work in telecom sales, is that when the network goes down business grade customers get brought up first, because you are paying more. That said reliability is fine for almost all nowadays.
Are you using this? Pros and cons? I have looked at dual wan router but this looks cleaner. Will read more on this, hmm?
The only reason to have a T1 these days is reliability and service. My T1 provider calls me before scheduled maintenance to make sure it's ok with me and also calls if they are detecting packet loss. I also got pretty candid reports on when my connection would be back up the 1 time it went down hard.