Hi, I have a wifi net connection of 4 Mbps. I get about 3 Mbps of download speed but only about 0.75 to 1.0 Mbps of upload speed. ( Actual speed is 3 mbps/8 = 375 KBPS & 1.0/8 = 125 KBPS ) My question is, how much does the upload speed matter ? What else matters in getting the correct quotes fast ? I follow about 30 Futures including major ones like ES, NQ, YM, TF, CL, GC, SI, all 5 major currencies, Bonds, T-Notes & Grains etc. Thank You.
You bandwidth as tested by measuring your up/down speeds matters only to the amount of data you can send or receive over a time interval. Your up speed of 1Mb will get your orders to your broker just as fast as if your up speed was 5Mb or even 100Mb because the amount of data is very small. More upload bandwidth only matters if your uploading large files. 1Mb of up speed is more than adequate.
Depends on the data feed you use. When I was having a Rithmic tick feed I was always running into problems with slow-upload and high latency. The feed protocol was such that data was sent in packets and the next batch would only be sent when my machine confirmed that all sent previously had been received and were correct. It caused me to start falling behind and what I thought was real-time was actually as much as 15 minutes behind, something I wouldn't notice unless I compared my PC clock with the latest bar time. Worked with the Tech Manager of my then broker and we identified the problem. Not much I could do then, with fibre optic cable to the home now it wouldn't be an issue. Anyway it is moot, I switched to IB and the snapshot data is small enough for even the slowest feed I reckon. Your feed is exceptionally slow, so check anyway to see if you get a lag with whatever feed you use.
Fast execution is more dependent on latency than bandwidth. You can could have a connection with bandwidth of 512MB download/upload that has better latency than a connection with 100GB bandwidth.
"Speed" should not be an issue. It is the bandwidth, and more importantly latency, that would impact you. Trading data doesn't take much bandwidth. Be sure you are not downloading or uploading movies and stuff while trading.
Like many people said most important is your ping, i.e. latency and that's really that much for sure. You need to test your package and then just simply change it to more correct one and that's it. I do not get anything like that for sure. I have 1GBPs.