You can do load balancing if you go with higher end NICs, NIC that can do NIC Teaming. I believe Intel and HP carry these kinds of NICs.
I have multiple PC's. I run a T1 and a cable connection. Speed/reliablity critical stuff runs on the t1, not so critical stuff on the cable.
Correct. Failover only. But correct me if i'm wrong, you can't load balance secure datastreams like quotes or broker connections anyway. Right? The main purpose of multiple internet connections for me is redundancy.
You can load balance locally but not to your broker through the internet. The only way to fully load balance between 2 internet connection is if you can justify having your ISP give you a BGP AS, and your own static IP from both ISP. Most businesses do it this way so when one ISP go down, customers won't even miss a heartbeat. I doubt the ISPs will allocate a BGP AS to you unless you can really really justify it.
BGP = Border Gateway Protocol AS = Autonomous System Really beyond the realm of ET users. You can probably Google this but it more for ISP's and large scale internet users (corporate networks). Not us simple types. Jack
Whatever you use, you will be fine but go with the lowest ping time connection if and only if it's the most reliable connection. I am around 200ms scalping from Brazil. My order hops around some 15 servers till NY so don't put too much energy thinking about these small details. Most trading shops will be around 5ms-30ms with their T-gazillion lines.