I have only tested ping time twice, below 80 both times, 74 and 76, I think that is milliseconds. Haven't checked hops, I think there is a tool called traceroute... I'm not very technical saavy. I had T1 in my former life in Michigan. My DSL is near the same speed. I think as more and more people move to my area, I worry that system may slow, but for last couple of years, YeeHaw, as we say here in Oklahoma. I have not regretted for even one second, baling out of corporate job to move back to Oklahoma. I feel like the luckiest person in the world.
One of the reasons I liked DSL better than cable for trading is because you don't have to share bandwidth with anybody. Cable will give you a higher speed, but the pipe is shared by the users on it. This means that the more subscribers they have, the less bandwidth each subscriber gets. The advantage of cable is that it is not dependent on your distance from the CO and the bandwidth is almost always higher. DSL, I have found, is much more stable and consistent than cable. SBC was a great provider in Chicago. The most important things for trading are latency and hops. My opinion is that DSL providers have had lower latency and fewer hops because they are usually connected to a backbone directly (they provide higher tier services - ie. SBC has Ameritech as a backbone provider in Chicago). Do a tracert from a command prompt in Windows with the IP address of your broker's server. You will then get a real idea of what is happening there.
I also live in Dallas, I am about 10,000 feet from the central office of SBC. They have put remote terminals in my area which is supost to help push the signal out further, I was 1600 feet from my remote terminal in my neighborhood. Let me tell you the signal was not good, the reason was a section of line in my alley was bad and they wont replace it, so I switched to Comcast a year ago and have been very very happy. I have lost service twice in one year for about 30 minutes.
Don't know. However, the internet is being used for things other than surfing now, so the bandwidth may be used by those watching TV over IP, downloading music at home while at work, etc. In either case, trading is far too important to leave it up to the cable company to decide how my bandwidth is split.
I myself have had better performance with cable broadband, the neighborhood I live in is a historic older neighborhood and the lines and equipment need upgrading.
do u actually get 21 mbps or is that just your "connection" speed? on a 100 mbps home LAN i may only get 1 mbps between my computers...
I called SBC and was told the only service available to my apartment is 128/384 Kbps. Since Roadrunner is advertised at 6Mbps, the math tells me that SBC DSL will be 15 times slower downspeed than what I'm currently using. I track close to 100 stocks and view about 20 charts at a time with IB TWS and Quotetracker, and usually am also using several other net applications at the same time. I have never had trouble with bandwidth using Roadrunner. But I don't have much of an idea of how much I'm typically using. I'm worried I need to start looking for a new apartment. Anybody have any ideas, advice? Thanks.