You should install NETWORX and you will see what you need in realtime. Will be rather Kb then Mb. Data does not need lots of bandwith. If your connection drops Ninjatrader will warn you with a sound and will restart automatically if the connection drop was a short time. At least that is what happens with me. In my area we have the best glassfiber connection in the world, so maybe that might be an explanation too. Cable delivers constant 200Mb/sec and is operational 99.99% of the year.
Unless its a dedicated internet connection for trading only, you probably want to prioritize your data with QoS so your trading remains unaffected. 10ms is more than good enough for medium frequency day trading.
Your Internet connection is the least of your worries. You could run a high rise building full of traders on fiber 15Mb/10ms without any performance issues since trading data feeds consumes very little BW & you have low latency - on your ISPs network anyway - you still have to traverse the cloud to reach your broker & your snail slow compared to the big fish your competing with. Fiber is fixed rate - meaning the latency and BW don't fluctuate at least not on your ISP's network. That means you don' t have to worry about having latency/BW degrade when school is out, or over subscribed last mile issues - like you get with cable providers.
What about if its a shared internet connection in a household that streams movies and TV shows in 1080p, does he have anything to worry about?
It will be fine, no need to worry about latency to the exchange, you could be in Iceland and scalp US futures with that connection.
What about if its a shared internet connection in a household that streams movies and TV shows in 1080p, does he have anything to worry about? It depends on your router/switch/firewall and exactly how much is being streamed at any given time. You most likely will not have any problems, but if your concerned about congestion than ask your ISP to do a traffic study - they should be able to give you charts showing your up & down BW/latency both up/down plotted over a day or whatever period you request. There are switches and routers that allow you to prioritize traffic (QOS), problem is that it needs to be on the upstream router at your ISP do do any good - this is not even an option.
Isn't the simple solution to just prioritize data with QoS and not worry about how much is being streamed at any given time? Why complicate it, its so easy to implement and doesnt degrade your service. Why get an ISP to do a traffic study when you can analyse and monitor it yourself with custom firmware such as dd-wrt/tomato etc Most retail modem/routers have some degree of QoS functionality these days. Thats not correct, if you're using a shared Internet connection in your household, your primary concern is how much bandwidth is being used that might bottleneck your 15Mb connection and increase latency. One has very little control over what happens outside of your local area network.
Isn't the simple solution to just prioritize data with QoS and not worry about how much is being streamed at any given time? Why complicate it, its so easy to implement and doesnt degrade your service. QOS on your home router can not resolve network congestion from users on your LAN that are saturating the BW, all it can do is shape what traffic it receives onto a priority queue for determining the priority (QOS) for sending the data on to your Ethernet ports. Your home router has no way of knowing when their is upstream congestion, hence it can not have any effect on something it does not even have visibility to. True QOS requires both your home router(edge) and your ISPs router (aggregation) to have matching QOS/traffic shaping policies. If you have MPLS from your ISP than yes, you have true QOS. They will do a survey with you to determine how to configure the QOS for your needs. ISP's trash untrusted QOS tags, and you bet you are untrusted. The only QOS they will pass through has to do with R Lovethetrade said: if you're using a shared Internet connection in your household, your primary concern is how much bandwidth is being used that might bottleneck your 15Mb connection and increase latency. One has very little control over what happens outside of your local area network. BW congestion at today's modern speeds is very unlikely, 90% of the suspected congestion problems I look at were caused by malware taking over and transmitting tons of data, the other 10% are usually business servers with up stream routing issues. Your home router can not show you if your WAN is congested. If you have a high end/expensive enterprise grade router than you can get a snapshot of the real time or 5 minute WAN BW. Your ISP traffic study is the only way to go if you think you have congestion just take a phone call or email. I am a 25 year network engineer at a ISP/Telco, doing consulting now so I can trade more. I have supported complex business networks up to fortune 500 HQs down to SOHO. Not trying to boast but so you know my comments are not just from winging it.