We are trying to get an office with 4 PCs. Each monitoring 3 commodities simultaneously. I was wondering what would be the minimum required bandwidth for this office. Should I go with 1 or more DSL pro line, or go directly to cable broadband services
Wouldn't it be cheaper to just switch over to cable? (also if you're daytraders, some more tech saavy than I can tell you about the drawback regarding latency and cable). I get 1.3 Mbps through my cable and like 300 through my DSL.
Cable works fine until you get a bunch of people suddenly jumping on line, I would never consider using it for trading.
What speed DSL & cable is available for your location? Naming the specific DSL and cable providers would be helpful too - they are not all equal. Depending on your requirements you may want to get both and get a dual-WAN router so that in case of an outage of either you wont be SOL. There have been several dual-WAN router threads on ET in the past.
You are saying "we" in your message. How many people are sharing the connection? If you have enough people, go with business class T-1 service. Your connection is your lifeline to the markets. This is not an area where I would get cheap. Business class DSL is the next best alternative. This level of service has better Service Level Objectives (SLO's) than a regular DSL line. Consider how much it would cost you to be without a connection for 1 day. Once you have put a number on that, then you can decide how much more you should spend to avoid it. For a small office of scalpers, that would be big $$ lost assuming that there were no positions on while the line went out (with positions on, you have a serious problem... for scalpers that is). Finally, what is the distance between you and your broker/clearer.
Thank you all for your kind advises, We will be 4 people, each one with 1 PC and 1 Laptop, Total 8 internet connection. One of the reasons I asked this questions was because I sniffed Tradestation and It measured 9-20 kb/s for each running chart. Therefore I began to wonder how much really is the required bandwidth to have up to 12 chart running on 4 PCs ? Is 1.5 MB/s enough for us. Well, I have a better view on the issue now. what is the distance between you and your broker/clearer. I am not sure How I exactly can find the answer to this question, Thanks everyone
I have had both DSL and cable at different times as well as most recently both and was manually switching between the two when I had a problem. Both have outages from time to time though in my experience DSL is less prone to outages but slower. If DSL goes out on you having two DSL lines won't make you feel any better. Best bet is to diversify in case of an outage with one of your providers. I currently have both DSL and cable, and let my dual wan router do the load balancing for me if one becomes too slow or has an outage. I finally got fed up after a series of DSL outages and went for a better solution than manual switching after some helpful people here on ET put me onto the idea: the dual wan router. So far I'm happy with the following router: http://www.hawkingtech.com/prodSpec.php?ProdID=219 I ordered if from buy.com here: http://hawkingtech.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php?vcode=H10&partnum=H2BR4 It is about the same cost as a regular 4 port router and has better firewall capabilities than all of the cheaper single wan routers I've tried (Linksys, Netgear, D-Link). Then buy an 8 port switch to share the connection between any additional computers.
Hi TriPack, Very Interesting. Having a wireless D-Link 624 right now, do you think I could continue to use the DLink behind your dual hawkingtech? Thanks. nononsense
One thing that you may not realize is that the DSL speed you can get is very distant dependent. If you are close to the CO (telephone central office) then you might be able to get 6Mb downstream (or more - depends on the provider), if you are far out you may only to be 384Kb downstream. Check out http://www.broadbandreports.com/prequal/distance and http://www.broadbandreports.com/prequal