hey all...quick question my internet provider (a small family owned company, awesome service) has upgraded all pkgs...he dropped the price on all his pkgs and greatly increased download (tryin to compete with cable) but he also decreased upload. i am currently on 4.0mbps download/1.5 mbps upload and for roughly same price i can goto 12.0mbps/1.0 mbps...would this decrease in upload speed really matter for trading?? i know ping is more important but would dropping to 1.0 upload from 1.5 be a big deal?? or should i try to negotiate something like 8.0/1.5? thanks boze
Probably doesn't make any difference at all. For years I traded on dialup and that was never a problem. Recent test show my actual traffic on about 250 real-time, live data issues is only about 20K/s... that's right, "K"... the proverbial "trickle through a fat pipe"...
I think it depends on how you trade. How do you trade? Many retails like me: I have lots of charts and indicators (download side). From time to time I place an order, or change a symbol name (that's upload side). The software has some sync signals, keep-alive kind of messages (upload side)... but those are minimal. The upload speed is not much of a concern. Unless you have a computer program that sends many new orders, cancel orders, modify orders every second. That's a different story. Check it for yourself. On your computer that you use for trading, during a regular session, monitor your network traffic. (My example is based on Windows 7) Start Task Manager. Go to the Networking tab. Under "View", "Network Adapter History". Buy default, the chart shows the total bytes. Turn on the Bytes Sent and Bytes Received. Turn off the Bytes Total. Your adapter traffic pattern will show. Compare the Yellow (Bytes Received) to Red (Bytes Sent). Probably Yellow is much higher than Red. Yellow is your download traffic. Red is your upload traffic.
Also note the "Network Utilization" statistics. You may have a 100Mbps adapter (these days, common). If the percentage of utilization is 1.00%, then your actual use is about 0.01 x 100Mbps = 1 Mbps. This way you can roughly figure out if you have saturated the download pipe size or not.
For most retail traders the difference in upload is not going to matter. The existing bandwidth is quite sufficient for most individual trading needs IMHO. IMHO, a more important "upgrade" would be a redundant and separate ISP connection in case one goes down. They make very nice multi-wan routers which will automatically and seamlessly "switch over" to the other ISP if one of the connections were to go down.
If you change the column display and check on "bytes received" and "bytes sent", you will see the actual numbers. You can compare the ratio. In my case, download-to-upload is about 10 to 1.