Hi there, I am hoping some of you might be able to help me with this as I am not techy at all myself ! I am currently trading from a prop firm in BC and will be moving out to Ontario Canada (Belleville) in a few months and trading from home. I believe we trade on a T1 line or ptp line within the office. I am trying to decide whether to get a cable or dsl connection in Ontario (or fibre if its available). I am purely a scalper and make hundreds of trades a day and it is really annoying when we have slow quotes and fills so I want to make sure that is not an issue out there. I only have a couple charts running but I do use a scanner that runs lists of several hundred stocks. I believe I may also have access to a fibre optic line but I will have to look into that further. So for my needs (scalping), what would you all recommend as the best type of connection (cable, dsl, etc ) ? I would pay to have a business package for whatever type of connection I choose, as it seems like that increases the speed a lot. I guess I am a little worried that my connection from home wont be as good as the one I am currently using in the office. I know latency, speed and reliability are the most important factors. Thanks in advance .
DSL is severely handicapped compared to Cable because DSL involves a copper wire that only is able to give "decent" speed and service within 12,000 feet of the local telephone switching office. Cable is the way to go. The performance can be between 5-8 times FASTER with Cable vs DSL. It's not even close. On another note, there is no need for a "business" account version of such a service. I am using Comcast Cable with their "Blast" service for $52.95 per month and am getting downloads on my local network as high as 23 MB's per second, and as high as 16 mb's across the country.
In order to obtain the fastest execution (lowest latency), you'll have to test cable versus DSL by utilizing ping tests.
maybe you're confusing bandwidth with ping times perhaps? for trading, gaming, etc, it's ping time or latency thats the "fastness". if you were downloading many large files then yes, bandwidth would be the choice. i would suggest that dependability is the overriding issue.. btw, satellite internet connections have the capability to download at high speeds - but suffer terrible latency issues.
both - subscribe to dsl and cable. plug them into a load-balancing router for redundantcy. you'll have plenty of speed and the safety of backup.
If I were you and you hadn't bought a new place in Ontario yet, I would figure out a simple speed test to try at each home you were looking at to buy. Ask the seller of each house if you could try this test. There might be other factors besides whether it's dsl or cable determining the speed. Ideally you could bring your own laptop and actually try the software that you need to run in the home you want to buy. Otherwise you might end up buying a house that is too far from a node, has old cable wiring etc.
then there's the promise of this... http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article3689881.ece so much for latency
i have cable and dsl. in my case (which i believe is within 1 1/2 miles of the dsl station), the price for the cable is about the same as the dsl, and much faster. i use both and have a box which switches when the cable goes down.
You need to do a TRACE ROUTE ( off your DOS prompt in Windows ) to the IP address of the trading/quotation server that your trading platform connects to. In this way, you can see what kind of "latency" exists in the route that is taken to get back to the server which provides you with your data-feed. More often than not, you have NO CONTROL over this kind of latency due in part because you are hostage to the Internet Superhighway and your local broadband provider has very little to do with this ( outside of their local network ). Concerning a trace-route, any millisecond numbers < 80 are good. Above 80-90 and you start to get a bit concerned. At the DOS prompt type: tracert(space)IP address of the server