Here in europe satellite is much faster. Over a regular Cable or Dsl i have up to 500ms delay... regularly around 120ms delay. And you only receive the quotes you select. With the satellite you save the quotes on your local server and with the satellite I have a max delay of 50ms. So for us here the satellite is much faster. I don't know how the delays are in the USA. And with the satellite you take down all the information at once.. downstream up to 20MB/s and save them on your own server. so when you look back in the history charts are build up much faster. when you go over a TCP/IP you first have to download all the historical information. alain switzerland
alain - How are you determining the satellite delay is only 50 ms? The geosynchronous transmission propogation delay (i.e., time for signal to travel from earth to satellite and back to earth) is about 240 ms? So even if there was zero propogation delay in getting the data to the satellite uplink, your minimum delay should be just under 1/4 second.
nitro - DSL isn't ubiquitous throughout all of the Chicago area. Seems SBC Ameritech was dragging their feet for a long time on suburban deployment while fighting in court about third party DSL providers getting access to their digital line equipment without at least reimbursing Ameritech for the cost of the line interface card hardware. They didn't want to have to potentially open their premises indiscriminately to every fly by night DSL reseller. That said, DSL is available by me but it's only 128K right now and it costs about the same as my existing ISDN so it's not worth it to me to go through the changeover until they delivery 384K+ speeds.