Just getting ready to hook up for daytrading and the only thing I can get for at least a year will be sattelite for getting Broadband connection. Are you using or have you used this type of conectioin before and what do you think of it? What are the plus's and minus's of this type of set up? The Sattelite service people I was getting info from said that it is a two way conectiona and would not have to use the phone line. Will have cable in our area within a year they say but who know's for sure. Thank You,
niner, Make sure it is really 2 way without a modem. DirectPC from direct tv uses a modem - download speed is fast using the satellite but your upload speed uses the modem. 2 way systems are very expensive so I would be cautious about what they tell you. Do you have any more details on the system? I also am getting ready to trade full time as my last software consulting gig ended last week and the market is dead. I had dsl and lost it last week because rythms went under. I was back to dialup. I had a second phone line installed and if you research this board and say silicon investor you will see that you can daytrade with dialup. I however do lots of other pc stuff and have servers so I needed dsl/cable etc. Luckily I found another dsl provider so I am up and running again. Best of luck, GaretJax
>Make sure it is really 2 way without a modem. >DirectPC from direct tv uses a modem - download >speed is fast using the satellite but your upload >speed uses the modem. Depending on ones trading style, it can be easy to disagree with the above. As traders, we generally have little/no use for large bandwidth capabilities on the upload side. Certainly placing an order for 500 shares of ABCD doesn't even begin to test the slowest of POTS modems. The latency issues of satellite systems however can be a real drag on trading and a two way system simply doubles this disadvantage. For the short term trader, satellite latency sucks and if forced to use such a system, I only hope that I can utilize a phone line for the upside so it only sucks half as much. JB
Niner Although I trade usa markets from uk I have both broadband ADSL and a cable modem as backup. I also have a motorised satellite dish, which I could use but the problem being is the up link is through the phone line so I didnât bother. Could you give me the url on the satellite folks you are thinking of using which has a two way connection? Out of interest, with my broad band, I still lose connections about two times a day. Software automatically tries to reconnect, but its still a nuisance. On bad days, which donât happen too often, it can be 10 times+ with severe packet loss. I used to have dial up modem but it just couldnât cope with the feeds coming through. ken
I have to agree : bandwidth is not the issue. I would trade in the blink of an eye a bad cable service or satmodem for a very stable 33.6 dialup. Strictly for trading, you need this : - a connection you know will remain up for 7 hours straight. - a connection with as few hops as possible [on the route to servers, the data packets should not bounce too many places. there are tools to check that]. - a connection with no bottleneck and no delays in data packets. not KB per seconds. these are extra and useful only after trading [to surf and download]. usually the only way is to try several services until you get what you need. Do not underestimate or underinvest. Trading without a reliable datafeed is stupid. I recommend a back up provider with a different method if possible [I use cable and dialup, 2 different providers, 2 different physical pipes]. Sometimes a simple but reliable dialup analog modem is a better solution than other methods. neo
I have Starband...it *is* a two way satellite service. I also have two additional land line ISP's, both using different backbones plus I have two pots phone lines.... With the dish, you'll want to consider the latency issue as ping times can go as high as one second. Really! That's one reason why I use the phone line for order entry and the dish for the data feed. The dish really shines when it comes to bandwidth...I've tried to use a single phone line for the data feed and, regardless of what you've read elsewhere, you may miss some ticks, depending on how much data you demand. In my case, I use a squawk box service and there's no way a single phone line can carry both data and the squawk box. Another thing you may want to consider is multilink. Some ISP's offer it and I use it from time to time when the weather is really bad and the dish isn't reliable. Multilink is simply the merging of two modems and two pots phone lines to give you more bandwidth...somewhere around 80kbs to 95 kbs. I really like it...low ping times and great bandwidth but like any dialup, reliability can be an issue. In the rural area I'm from, there are no dsl, isdn or cable modem services (thank you, Verizon. )It is just the dish and a couple of phone lines. Frankly, it really sucks. If you're in a situation such as mine and you want to *really* trade stocks, then consider (drum roll) a T-1. Major bucks...around $900 a month for a burstable T-1 according to UUNET plus the router and installation. I just spent the better part of a week ckecking out a proprietary firm and there is no way I would try to compete with those guys (from my location) with anything other than a T-1. If I join the firm, and I'm seriously thinking about it, then for sure I'm going to use a T-1. I know that it sounds like overkill but I sure as hell don't want to blow any trades just because I was too cheep to use the proper tools. Besides, you get a 100% write off at tax time. Best regards, Jim
Great article on CNET about satellite usage: http://www.cnet.com/internet/0-3762-8-6949920-1.html?tag=ld Grey
I'd like to indirectly add to airspeed's comment, because I'd like to make sure my point is not lost. For the data feed itself you need only a few hundred bytes per seconds. the data is compressed with most providers, it takes very very few bandwitdh. Well, then if you add to it other services then a regular modem won't be enough. I usually have a voice call running with internet phone on my line. Of course I can do this because I have a cable broadband service. So unless, like airspeed you need a squawkbox or voice chat, a small bandwidth is enough. delays, latency are the real issues, not bandwidth. delays mean losses, disconnection mean losses. so regardless of price, choose for something reliable without delays, then and only then seek for bandwidth. T1 is the best possible choice when available. ADSL is often good but not always. ISDN is good too but not really broadband.
that is being offered is the one that uses Pegasus. Here is the link to a site that pretty much has the info that you get down town here. http://www.skynettech.com/contentv1.html Please look at their Q&A section as they say it adds about 1/2 second of latency. Another question, first thanks for bringing up the latency issue as I had not thought of that. Along these same lines what is the trade off from the latency and the fact that if you are running 3 monitors that you can get all of your charts and programs without them being all bottlenecked up like they would with lower band width? It seems to me that most all of our providers in the area pretty much suck. If you are not taken off line by being disconnected at least 7 times a day then you are having a very good day around here. Thank you all for your answers, I appreciate them much.
I need to address a point made by tntneo about latency...in my reply I seemed to gloss over high ping times. He's 100% correct...delay means trouble. When you go to a dish, any dish imo, you're going to have terrible ping times. Starband wasn't particularrly up front about it and it seems that Hughes, in all it's incarnations, isn't eiher. Be ready for latency at or greater than 1 sec. When you put an additional 50k miles in the route the packets take, things go right to hell. Do a "ping" or better yet, a "tracert" to check this out...Starband has gotten this down a little by, as I understand it, by tweeking their on-planet hardware. Just so there is no misunderstanding, let me put it this way: Starband's latency makes the service a poor choice when it comes to highly time-sensitive data delivery and I don't recommend it. In some cases it can be better than a phone line, such as my case. But that sure doesn't mean it is good. If you need more than the ~49k you'll get over a phone line, your best solution may be multilink. Try that before you stick a bunch of hardware on your roof...it is a whole lot cheaper...I wish I had. Best regards, Jim