I am sorry, the answer is totally off. I agree that HOME SERVICE dsl lines are bad. In the last 10 years I had and had arranged half a dozen DSL based SLA including business lines for various customers etc. The trick to see here is that T1 is simply outdated tech. At least in germany for some years a lot of commercial grade carries allow you go get lines using SDSL up to 8mbit (symmetric) and / or similar ADSL / VDSL asymetric connections. It simply makes more sense to use that technology than T1's. You get a lot more capacity through even cheaper lines. And that: * Includes SLA's. Btw., 24 hours is unaccetpable. My last commercial connection had a response time of 4 hours to FIX (not for someone on site, but to have it resolved).
As tempted as I am to rip you a new one for asking that question, I'm feeling nice today so I will just say; Google is your friend.
I use a T1, I'm a high volume futures scalper. I've only been using the line since I moved to a new location, before had a 20meg direct pipe. To be honest, I haven't felt any different than w/ the direct line, knock on wood....except for one exceptionally high volume day and out of, maybe 200 orders I entered into the market, I noticed two were delayed a split second or so. So it seems fine...if the problems during busy times become more pronounced I'll try a T3. The T1 is only connected to my trading computer, which is a quad core dell T3400 w/ 4 gigs Ram. Only software that runs on it is my trading front end.
a true T1 is more than enough. Bloomberg requires clients to have a T1 when there are more than 4 terminals at one location (a T1 is not required to support 1-4 bloomberg terminals but a T1 can support 5-9 terminals, two T1's support 10-14 terminals and so on)
It's not a question of how many charts, it's a question of how many instruments and if you have L2 for those instruments. Most people here neither want nor need everything traded on an exchange. For most people T1 bandwidth is more than enough. I am currently monitoring more than 250 stocks including the major etfs such as SPY with DTN IQFeed. Downstream traffic is ~ 1 MBit/Sec.