I'm looking into the costs to get connected to CME. I've investigated different paths I can take that are indirect (different feeds, etc), but was wondering about going directly. Two (related) questions: 1) Marketdata: Assuming I want to connect directly (listen to the multicast feed and use my own fix/fast parser) what are my different options here? I could obviously get rackspace in a data center and use one of CME's connection options like direct or lnet, and that looks like it might cost anywhere from 2-10k/month. But, are there any other ways to do this? Does anyone offer either managed hosting or colocation that already has some sort of network pipe into CME? What is the cheapest this type of connection could be setup for? 2) Sponsored access - what kind of minimum initial capital / average volume would be required if I wanted to send orders directly through FIX/iLink rather than through some third party (clearing / broker) machine first? Who offers this? Thanks.