Airspeed I am using Starband. What are you switching to? When I got my satellite installed the technician told me that there was something new coming out this spring, Blue....something or other. I forgot the name. Its a satellite service that he said would have about 1mb upload and download. I looked up the website at the time and it was indeed a satellite service but I cant remember the name. Has anyone heard anything about it? They were waiting on the satellite launch at the time. It should be up there by now.
I'm going with a 128k dedicated line. Main reasons for leaving Starband are the packet loss issues, the latency issue and those fairly frequent satellite outages that make me bonkers when I'm in a trade. What I'm doing now is using the dish for the data feed from Nextrend and using a 56k dial up line for my order entry to IB. About my new line, the bandwidth of the line is limited only by how much I'm willing to pay and 128k should be more than adequate for my purposes. Don't get me wrong, I pretty much like starband. Out here on the lake, starband is the only option for high bandwidth internet service and they're doing a pretty good job. However, trying to enter a order for a trade on starband truly tests my nerves as virtually every ping test shows about a 25-50 percent packet loss. That's unacceptable for trading, imo. Sure, there's error correction built into the protocol but to resend a corrected packet takes time and when trading I usually don't have it. Best, Jim
I went back to this thread to check something and found the post by Archangel that I had missed before. I checked out NIST32 and got this link: http://www.boulder.nist.gov/timefreq/service/its.htm This is a great little program that updates your clock and adjusts for any delay. Accuracy within 500ms. Put a shortcut on your desktop and anytime you want to check time and sales quotes just click. Aint technology wonderful. Thanks AA!
For what it's worth: www.time.gov.> one full second faster than: >nistime32, which is almost a full second faster than: >philex atomic clock. Three different sites, three different times (albeit not by much). Some how this doesn't surprise me. Doesn't bother me too much either since I don't scalp.
Dang it Bronks, I thought I had this thing worked out and you had to come along and bust my bubble. You are right. Nist lags time.gov by about a second or else time.gov is about a second fast. Back to the drawing board. I know I'm nitpicking here but I enjoy tweaking things. There is a disclaimer below the time.gov time that says "accurate within 1.6 seconds" over the satellite and 2.6 seconds over the 56k so it doesnt look like I'm going to be able to get the accuracy I want.
I use a time synchronization program called Tardis 2000. It has about 45 different servers to measure from and can use multiple servers to get the most accurate time then reset the clock automatically. It can be setup to correct the clock at regular times by itself. Works great. Shareware from Tucows. http://tde.tucows.com/preview/195340.html flier
Easyrider, the disclaimer on time.gov is automatically set based upon the lag it detects in your connection. I can't believe that your satellite connection would give you a 1.6 second delta. At my office, using a low badwidth DSL line, time.gov never disclaims more that 0.2 seconds. So, I wonder.... is satellite really so slow? Kind of scary, if you ask me. Back to the original point of this thread, who cares if your clock is accurately set if your data is already delayed 1.6 seconds just based upon your connection. That's not even including all the other things that can delay data, like you host's server, data scrubbing, etc. Cheers. faction.
You can also type the following command line in your ms dos prompt: tracert www.elitetrader.com (or any other URL or IP address) This will show the # of hops between servers and the times for each hop. This can be helpful because it will show you where the delay is at. For instance if your highest times are on the last few hops, you would have a signal that your data provider is sending slow quotes. If the slowest times were in the first few hops then you would be signaled that the slowness occurs when the quotes hit your firewall or somewhere else in the office. If your times show anything over 200 ms or a request timed out then this would be a cause for concern.