can you daily trade efficiently futures with this adsl speed? max download speed of 384 kbps max upload speed of 64 kbps Wouldn't I be better off with a Two way satellite link, 512kbits down, 128kbits up? I'm currently in the UK where I use a 2.2 Mbps adsl connection and planning to relocate to an island where only the above connections are available. Any idea what latency I could expect assuming I use X trader/top hardware configuration? thanks
Its not possible to guess latency without information about 2 things: 1. Ping times to your trading system server (the TT server that sits, I guess close the the exchange gateway) 2. Average amount of market data that you are going to get to your computer. Apart from the "ping time" latency is caused by too much data trying to come down a too small pipe.
satellite has the worst latency. i suppose your adsl is not terrific, but if you try to optimize your data flow, it might work just fine.
Thank you for replying, so satellite is out of the question. May I ask what determines Ping times to the trading system server? Is it a function of your server provider, your bandwith, your location,....? regarding the average amount of market data/data flow, this can be minimised by just having the data flow for one single future, the ES for instance. No charting software, no other markets, no market depth, just the bid/ask of the market you trade. That should minimise data flow don't you think?
To send a ping to your server is an easy way of measuring the time it takes for one data package to travel to your server. That time is dependent on 2 things: (1) the distance it needs to travel, and here satellite would likely be the longest distance, and (2) the number of "network hops" that it needs to navigate. A router that connects one network to another is an example of such an hop. If you are only looking at one futures contract then your bandwidth should be plenty. Just make sure that your TT screen does not subscribe to things that you are not looking at - I don't know if they do. Just be aware that even though you don't overload the network it might be overloaded by other users of your ISP and that could cause latencies. The only way to guarantee low latency is dedicated lines or guaranteed bandwidth in networks such as Radianz
Like other people mentioned it's the latency that is the most important, and satellite service is horrible. Latency can be affected by many things that the average consumer can't compare ahead of time. Hops between you and your endpoint can play a roll, but even if you are 4 hops away you might have slower response time than a 20 hop path. A hop is basically a router that sits between two networks. Depending on what type of hardware that router is and the load on it is will greatly determine your latency between networks. If you have one overloaded router in your path it doesn't matter if it's 2 hops away or 2000. Latency can increase if you or any provider between you and your end point is saturating their pipes. With ADSL I highly doubt you would come anywhere close unless you were also using your connection to pull down music or video at the same time. So, the key will lie with your provider. So, my suggestion to you would be to shop for an ISP that has at least two FULL DS3 pipes to different backbone providers. You can ask them how old their routers are and what their current saturation percentage is, but they'd probably lie to you if the answer wasn't good. I think most local ISPs would allow you to come into their office and run some ping tests out to various locations before you buy. The two DS3's to major backbone carriers is key because once you make it onto the backbone you are going to be fine since they are way overbuilt. However, there are some networks that exchange packets on overloaded NAPS (network access points). By having two paths to the backbone you will almost certainly avoid having any of your data cross through NAPs. For example, and this is incorrect by the way, UUNet might not have a private peering poing with Savvis, but ATT might. One final point. You can ask them who their backbone providers are and there is plenty of research out there that will tell you how good those backbone providers are. You could try www.keynote.com for starters, but there are lots of network health websites out there.