How slow is too slow an internet speed for intraday trading?

I trade equities and most hold times are less than 1 minute. My internet speed is painfully slow.

Nearest fiber internet is 88 miles away. I don't want to move, but am considering buying office space in town about 4 miles away. They have DSL and cable there.

Other considerations are Starlink. Which might be up and running this time next year at my location. Higher latitudes should start this fall, but closer to equator you are, the longer it will take and performance remains to be seen.

Currently i use a Verizon Hotspot and today measure
12.2 Mbps download 0.47 Mbps upload Latency: 54 ms
Some days will be worse and some days a bit better.

Some days (like today) my TOS charts badly lag my TOS last prices. Of course, that may or may not be related to my internet speed. Execution on market orders was lagging several seconds early in the day (which is not unusal) sad to say.

How slow is too slow an internet speed?

 

Starlink is meant to be quicker than fibre as the satellites talk to each other by laser. Try www.interactivebrokers.com Is rumoured to be good on low bandwidth connections.

 

I think years ago people were using IB satisfactorily on 1mb connections.

 

Your latency is more important than bandwidth and that's pretty good, you'll be fine.

 

How about T-1, phone connection?

 

There old school, only 1.5Mbps

 

Exactly, internet speed isn't important for trading. Latency is and 54 ms is good.

 

My 150mbps fibre line has about the same Latency, used to trade stocks on a 512K and even on a 56K modem before that with 30 stocks being watched and streamed.

 

If a simple PING request has a reply that is in the high triple digits (900+ ms), then you have a very slow connection.

Keep in mind that practically any connection will suffice. It's not like you are sending a huge amount of data when placing trades.

 

Lol. I remember using 14,700 over a dial up.