Thanks for your post. There you go, kids ... you get what you pay for... And leading edge technology is very expensive. Connectivity, redundancy, hardware, 100K/year engineers to keep things running smoothly... Upgrading year after year to stay leading edge... A very expensive proposition. Waaay back in the 80s... when I was programming quote systems for CMQ Communications in Toronto... 15 second latency was the norm for a professional quote terminal. Today... on a much cheaper scale of roughly $1000/month connectivity and quote costs... I'm at roughly 100 ms total latency... (And robust is more important... today 300 trades and no software incidents)... But that's OK... because I trade niches that Big Players can't be bothered with.
what you do need to pay attention to is that it ISN"T that expensive. There are brokers that are building up (yes, they appear to be niche, but as NMS approaches, and speeds and throughputs matter) systems that some of the low latency/high throughput crowd used to keep for themselves. SO, there are ways to get the low latencies, the high throughputs, and the direct data feeds ALL through these brokers. And if you do ask around, you'll see that some of these places offer data feeds out at cost (redistribution cost...) or slight mark ups. I don't think you really need to dig too deep to figure out that there is a cheaper way to do things in the States, in particular. With every merger, and every consolidation, there is one less point to point connection that has to be monitored, and resources have to be allocated to keeping the busy connections not on;y up and running, but running quicky and FAT as far as data and trading/messages goes. Institutions can pay whatever, and are figuring out that these places HAVE the technology, the engineers, and the staff to stay current and maybe even a step ahead. SOme of them are doing staggering volume catering to the quant crowd, but picking up funds and traders who just can't deal with the slowdowns of late, and all the problems now with consolidation, data surges, etc. Under a per share charge, and data out at costs, it doens't need ot be a crushing costs to get involved. I'd just say that you should look a bit closer and call around - you'd be surprised who's doing it for less than you think and how some of these co's business models work. Keep in mind as well that a tech company can only charge a large nut to go after and try to nail down institutional business, but a b/d business model allows these co's to charge a per-share rate for the technology, so it could be less start-up cost intensive under that scenario. It doesn't ned to be a huge cost for feeds in one direction and pipe sin the other. Severla places are doing it, and some of them very well.....ask around....
isint using FIX mean its not the fastest by definition? FIX sends data in ASCII meaning it requires more bandwidth / transmittion time and also means you need to parse out the values as they arrive.