Actually, with both DSL and cable, what TIER your provider is makes a big difference. My local telco is Sprint local. I'm only two hops from sprintlink.net which is believe is a TIER 1 provider. I hardly ever experience any loss, latency or downtime. Not true though when I had Rhythms and an ISP. I had 3 times the throughput but I was down all the time, and had many other problems. As much as I hate the local telephone company, I must admit that their DSL is OK. Their technical support and customer service still stinks. Mike
ISDN may be a worthwhile choice. I'd say it's far more reliable than cable or DSL and it's reliablity is proven. For my money, I'd choose reliability over speed any day. I only trade one future contract (emini) so I don't need speed. But if my connection goes down....I can kiss my ass goodbye.
I completely disagree. ISDN comes in two flavors, dial-up and nailed up. Both are digital connections where no a/d conversion takes place. 2B + 1D is 144 kbs. Typically the connection is made to the same network as DSL is in the Telco Central Office. The nailed up type is DSL, more commonly known as IDSL. Usually the telco tries to sell you this cut down rate when you are too far from the CO to get regular ADSL or SDSL. In both cases the weakest link is the copper between you and the Telco CO. If a car hits a pole, or the Telco is doing cable splices, you are going down. The same applies to cable. Mike
How do you ping the server? Also, aren't there many servers involved in a DSL or cable connection to your trading server, so would you have to ping every one of those? Thanks in advance!
Go to DOS or Command prompt. Type the following: ping rutgers.edu or ping "mydataprovider.com" Not all IP addresses reply to ICMP echo requests (pings). Ask your data provider for an IP address that you can ping if you can't figure it out. Traceroute (tracert on Windoze) sends out a UDP packet and waits for an ICMP packet to return, allowing TTL (time to Live) and Round Trip calculations to each router. traceroute mydataprovider.com Check it out. Mike
No, ping sends an echo request to the destination. The ping packet travels through all the routers between you and the destination. Also, I don't think that bandwidth is as important as your quality of service. You could have the biggest pipe in the world to the internet, but if your packets are bottlenecking or getting dropped along the way, the big pipe isn't helping any. A smaller pipe with less errors is better. Use a traceroute and try and determine how many hops you are from a TIER 1 provider. (att, sprintlink, uunet, etc). During problem periods, do a traceroute. See if the router that is hanging is before the TIER1 provider or after. If it is constantly before, bitch like crazy at your ISP or change service. This is true for all service T1, DSL, cable, etc. Mike
Download PingPlotter from www.pingplotter.com . There is a freeware version. This will allow you to graphically monitor the path hop-to-hop from your computer to the destination. Look for a high percentage of missing packets along the route at peak times in the day. Missing packets indicate that your ISP doesn't have a service level agreement with the downstream backbone providers. When the downstream routers backup, they throw the non-priority traffic over-board. "Speed" between you and the Cable company or Telco is seldom the issue. Good luck.
Be advised that you cannot directly ping some servers. Townsend for example blocks it to protect against denial of service attacks. They have something called "beacon" as I recall that you can tracert or ping. I don't remember the IP address but it is something like beacon.taltrade.com. I totally concur with Bullfighter that quality of connection is much more important than raw speed. Unfortunately, itis hard to determine except through experience.
right, not every server can be reached by ping. but jmsco told he uses ts6 - as i do - and those servers are reachable by ping. you can also find all ip-adresses(from ts network) unter 'file-preferences-network'. thats why i guess, dataservers are down and not my provider in case of ts-downtimes. i dont believe anyway, that a provider is really down. according to the tech of dsl, the data is compressed, and the compressing stations may be overloaded often. id prefer a provider, who garantuees the bandwith. the most do not so long lippi
Thanks for the info on how to ping. Forgive my further ignorance, but how do I do a traceroute? I was kinda confused by what you wrote; I'm probably not getting the techno-speak. Thanks again.