I traded on dial up too and it worked great! No charts though and for price updates I had to keep bumping the Enter key. Those were the days! My experience is that satellite blows and cable rocks.
I'm also running a VOIP phone line through a T-Mobile router. As I said, I'm not a big techie, so I wanted to ask if this will slow me down or not. This is what it would look like. cable modem ->cat5->t-mobile router->cat5->PC From the T-mobile router, I also have a regular phone line (RJ45?) to my phone. Thanks again.
The more links you have in your chain, the greater chance of problems and the greater latency. It depends how heavy of a trader you are. Average retail trader it will have little bearing as long as that router is up to speed and you don't smash cables under furniture feet, have cats & dogs chew on them, etc. You can try different setups by configuring your setup and visiting www.speedtest.net You can find your latency and bandwidth. Try to bounce it off servers in Chicago and NY if that's where the servers are you're trading off of (most are). I would do it with direct cat5 from cable modem to pc and then with your router in the middle of that and see if there's any remarkable delays.
Seriously now, If you daytrade,you need two internet connections. Cable and DSL/satelite each with ONLY trading PC's on it.
Your VOIP phone line and the Cable Modem that supports that broadband line isn't a problem. I have the same set-up via Comcast. Don't just think that you need fast download speed when it comes to being a remote trader. Where your Broker is located can actually be an issue as well, given all of the internet traffic congestion that occurs across the country which you have ZERO control over. For example, if you are located on the West Coast but your broker is back in NY or NJ, you are going to have to go through all sorts of transfer hops along the Internet superhighway and leased lines that are not the responsibility of your broadband provider. As a result, you can wind-up facing congestion at times that you have no control over. On the other hand, if your broker is located not that far from you, then you will have an "edge" and not have to deal with latency issues. For the retail remote trader, this is certainly something to think about. You can always do a trace-route to show any latency issues on the transer hops to your Broker's server. Go to your DOS Command Prompt and type in "tracert"(space) and then the IP address of the server you are connecting to at your Broker. Your numbers will be fairly low ( in the teens ) for the first few transfer hops because you are on your local broadband provider's network. The numbers will usually increase into the 70's and 80's after about 6 hops. This is fine. Anything over 100 is a problem. Good Luck!
Do you have more information on this avenue? Are there any other suggestions for people that are restricted to other options? I'm based in Chicago... I too am going remote, live in an old loft building and our association only has contracts with 2 providers, AT&T DSL or some local DSL, you get the drift, DSL only... I saw that AT&T has 6mbs down and 768kbps up.. I too will be using lightspeed, and I want the best possible, but it looks like this might be my only option. It will be the only computer on the network at the time, how badly will this hinder me?
Checkout Thinkgrid.com: They have hosted desktops in a DC data center < 4ms to NY, 20ms to Chicago 100mb connectivity. You can load up your software... Use their windows or java client. logmein.com is a decent low bandwidth client allowing you to control your hosted desktop and trade from any browser or even an iphone. Here is the trade off: Your trading platform processes data feeds and order triggers at near exchange speed. Your screen updates will be delayed by 1/2 your net latency but your not pushing anything other than screen updates and mouse events. Works well for automated trading and most discretionary traders... but if you are accustomed to 4 monitors with lots of charts and streaming video this is not a good fit. If you can trade on a single monitor this is worth trying.
Just got Time Warner today and I get nothing more than 40's and 50's on the "tracert" after the first 10 hops. I also did not see any significant difference going through my VOIP router or straight from modem to pc. I'm getting about 18Mbps down and 700Kbps up. Thanks for the help, much appreciated.