Starband is a two way,,no phone line,,satellite system,,fyi. Isn't there anyone that uses this? Seems it would sure beat dial-up if your livin back in the sticks.
It's not that bad. I've had directwav which is 2 way for about 2 years now. The latency is about 700ms or .7 sec on average so far charting etc it's fine. The bandwidth is on average about 500-700Kb, sometimes as high as 1.5M, sometimes as low as 200K but on average 400K. I pay $69.95/month. Extreme weather will knock it out. What I ended up with and works fine is Sat for my charting and general use/backup trade entry and ISDN for my trade entry platform. ISDN cost me about $40/month and gives me 128K which is plenty for Jtrader or TWS. With this config I don't think internet access has ever been an issue for me. If a stable DSL or Cable was available to me I'd certainly go that route but it's not and many of my friends with DSL certainly suffer more outages and risk from connectivity losses than I have.
Since I cannot get DSL or Cable where I live, I use the Direcway/2 way satellite system. It's not as fast as DSL or Cable and I'd get either one of those in place of satellite if they were an option to me and as long as they were nice and stable. I pay 62.99 per month and the initial install was approximately 600$. (I really don't remember the exact figure on the installation, Id have to look it up and I had satellite TV installed on the same bill) The lag is approximately 3/4 second each way, so for a round trip - transmit and receive it's about 1.5 seconds. This lag makes it pretty useless for online gaming, such as Quake or Tribes2, etc. 700 ms. latency is common for satelitte but I don't get any packet loss like I was getting with dial-up so my charting runs much better during fast markets than it ever did with dial-up and I was running two modems to my local isp in a shotgun/handshake configuration. = double speed. As far as trading goes the 3/4 second lag doesn't bother me at all. I trade the nasdaq eminies with it. The satellite beats the heck out of my modem/phone lines. I do have a dial-up isp for backup in the event that the satelitte goes down. Sometimes heavy clouds and rain cause outages but I have had it stay up and running all day through light to moderate rain. The dish is mounted on a fairly heavy pole that is set in concrete and the wind does not affect it. Every so often they will have transponder trouble on their end and I can have connectivity problems then. Thankfully this has not been an often occurrence but it has happened two or three times in the past year. When it does happen my experience with customer service has not been all that great. In my opinion their customer service leaves a lot to be desired. All in all it beats the dial-up that I had hands down, but if I could get a good reliable cable or dsl connection, I'd make a paper weight out of the satellite.
Just curious, I often see RVs with satellite dishes (presumably for video signals). I'm wondering if there are any traders out there who trade while on the road in an RV / trailer, etc. via satellite dish?
I used two way satellite for a little over a year. It was pretty good for recieving data but absolutely sucked for trade execution (scalping). I ended up using a dialup for my broker. When they brought dsl to my tiny town I jumped all over it. I love it. There is no comparison. Weather can also effect satellite reception.
Have older 1 way at my house in sticks which I trade on AH. I believe it slows down a lot between 5 and 8 PM EDT or so when I'm guessing the most Americans are using it. I think their satellite is all clogged up. Maybe its all in my head. "You will be a very old man before cable gets to you." -the Adelphia guy
if you are a scalper..... forget satelite... or just make anice donation to yout favorite charity.... money better spent
I have customers using starband and report no significant problems. Of course, if you have a good DSL, there is no reason to change. These people are in the mountains and have no high speed alternative other than satellite. The other option to consider is a broadcast satellite feed. Use it for your quote feed, and the DSL for any 2 way communication (trading). Lag time on our satellite is .5-1 second up and back and you get the full market tick by tick (including options and level II). We currently pump out around 1MB broadcast, but can increase that to 7MB if required. It is mostly used by users who need full market scanning or prefer to store their own data for analysis (most using Ensign or Investor/RT). Jay Froscheiser DTN Market Access, LLC.