Use the lower latency 60ms (ping) line as your primary. Just don't be downloading porn or movies during trading hours
Go with reliability, not speed. I have both cable and adsl with a HotBrick failover traffic manager. My cable is much faster but hiccups several times a week so I use it as my failover connection. Just a warning though. Failover devices, such as HotBrick, are not the ideal solution. You have to configure HotBrick to ping an ip address outside your network in order for it to recognize your line is down. Depending on configuration this process can take take some time, 30-60 seconds or more. Do a seach on ET and you'll find some good advice plus other solutions that may be better and cheaper than HotBrick, like adding two network cards to your trading computer each connected to a different line.
I run 2 separate routers and 2 NICs in each PC. XP does an amazingly good job of switching over, just a few seconds. And it's easy to force (disable an NIC) if for some reason XP doesn't switch over.
thanks for ur advice! i just got a linksys dual wan router, im gonna config it tonight see how long is the switch time. it sounds like 2 network card works better than dual wan router?
Generally, speaking: Ping. > Mbps. Ping tells you how fast a message reaches the destination. This is what's important. Anything after that becomes something a person with this type of question wouldn't ask.
http://www.nessoft.com/kb/5 http://www.nessoft.com/kb/2 and here: http://www.nessoft.com/kb/24 Jack, isn't the packet loss % at the intermediate hops supposed to be ininfluent as long as the final destination have no lost packets? Bernard
why use 2 single wan routers? cant you just conect the ISPs to each NICs directly? it it because you want the hardware firewall? is it really helpful? i know routers they may slow down the connection. sorry i know i have too many questions... but any input is appreciated
Bernard: Think of the internet as a series of different streets connecting two points. If all the traffic lights are green you get there at the speed limit. If there is an intersection that has a light that goes from green to red and back to green traffic slows. You get there, but more slowly. When a bad packet is detected it gets discarded (packets are internally serial numbered) and the router that detected the bad packet requests a retransmission of that packet from the preceding router. When it gets it successfully it forwards it on and the entire message stream, made up of a number of packets, is reassembled. This takes time. TCP/IP was designed to be robust (it was actually designed to remain functional during a nuclear attack) and to get the message through. In a properly designed network your message can be rerouted half-way through and you'd be unaware of a network problem unless you were measuring latency (or listening to music or voice). What I did not mention in my previous reply is the influence of local loading on latency. To simplify a bit - Your PC connects to a router. That physical connection uses the ethernet protocol. If you have a number of PC's operating on your local area network the traffic will slow as there is contention for use of the network bandwidth. In a DSL connection you are essentially tied directly to your ISP's router and then into the backbone network, no local contention. In a cable connection you are tied into a neighborhood local area network. That network is tied to the ISP router. So as more of your neighbors use their internet connections your effective bandwidth goes down and your latency goes up. I haven't done any reading on the newer digital cable systems so it's possible they have changed their network architecture and this is no longer a problem. Jack