Best internet connection for scalping- trying to decide between cable and dsl ?

Ok let me explain a couple of things is very simple terms.

First is bandwidth. Most ISP's offer packages in terms of bandwidth. Bandwidth is how much you can upload or download per second. Think of this as a straw or hose. A dial up connection might be a coffee straw while cable and DSL are more like garden hoses and T1 lines are like fire hoses. Obviously the bigger the hose/straw the more water you can get per second.

The second major factor is ping times or latency. This is basically how fast the smallest amount of data can get from one place to another round trip. A bigger hose will NOT make this any faster. The single largest factor with this is "internet distance". If you ping your next door neighbor's computer, the ping packet has to go to your ISP's servers, then to your neighbor's ISP servers then to your neighbor's house and finally back to you...this is "internet distance". Another big factor in ping time is the number of "hops" between you and your ping target. Hops are any device with a reporting IP address. You can see how many hops there are between you and your target by using the /tracert command that someone else mentioned earlier.

With Trading the ping time/latency will be the biggest factor. Unfortunately it will be almost impossible to predetermine which service will provide the best pings until you get them hooked up to test.
 
Quote from trader123abc:

So my read for line 12, last line in test
38ms 37 ms 38ms gw1.ibllc.com{208.245.107.3}

The above was the last line of the trace
to IB
So this would be a good trace number?

When I do a ping test to IB
I get bytes =32 time 37,\ms TTL=111
4 times
I have always had good fills so I am guessing the above test are good?
More...
Yes, those are good traceroute times (in the 30 ms range), here are the last few hops that I get:
Code: 
11     3 ms     3 ms     3 ms  0.ge-5-1-0.XL4.IAD8.ALTER.NET [152.63.41.162]
12    17 ms    17 ms    15 ms  0.so-6-0-0.XL2.BOS4.ALTER.NET [152.63.16.130]
13    16 ms    15 ms    17 ms  POS7-0-0.GW12.BOS4.ALTER.NET [152.63.22.181]
14    24 ms    23 ms    26 ms  interactivebrokers-gw.customer.alter.net [208.192.181.62]
15    28 ms    23 ms    26 ms  gw1.ibllc.com [208.245.107.3]

You can see that I pick up most of my latency when I go from Washington (IAD) to Boston (BOS) and then from Boston to IB.

Geographic distance tends to be the leading contributor of latency although there are other causes. Contrary to popular belief, data over fiber does not travel at the speed of light.
 
Quote from Landis82:

Is this what you were talking about when you said that Comcast was "throttling" back some of its bandwidth?
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landis - yes, that was part of it. the rest was stuff that's a lot vaguer, and not as much, but yes, that was it.

i know that at least one company in canada and the uk have done stuff as well - whether it was filesharing related or not, i can't remember...which is why it's best to research the companies first.

i keep hoping fios will come to my area so i can go cable/fios, rather than cable/dsl...
 
GTS


Registered: Jun 2006
Posts: 752


New Post 04-07-08 10:05 AM

Quote from trader123abc:

So my read for line 12, last line in test

code:
11 3 ms 3 ms 3 ms 0.ge-5-1-0.XL4.IAD8.ALTER.NET [152.63.41.162]
12 17 ms 17 ms 15 ms 0.so-6-0-0.XL2.BOS4.ALTER.NET [152.63.16.130]
13 16 ms 15 ms 17 ms POS7-0-0.GW12.BOS4.ALTER.NET [152.63.22.181]
14 24 ms 23 ms 26 ms interactivebrokers-gw.customer.alter.net [208.192.181.62]
15 28 ms 23 ms 26 ms gw1.ibllc.com [208.245.107.3]


GTS

What type of connection to you have?

I am using DSL 6MB from ATT
My area is about set up for ATT fiber
Uverse service. I wonder if that will get me lower trace numbers.

TY for reply
Trader
 
Quote from trader123abc:

What type of connection to you have?

I am using DSL 6MB from ATT
My area is about set up for ATT fiber
Uverse service. I wonder if that will get me lower trace numbers.
More...
I am currently running over a 200Mbps connection (enterprise class fiber connection).

I don't have any first hand experience with uverse.

A lot of latency depends on how your ISP is interconnected with the destination (the path that your traffic takes).

For instance you can see from my traceroute that my traffic went from Washington to Boston before going to IB (Chicago I presume). If the traffic had gone directly from Washington to Chicago without the side-trip to Boston it would have had less latency. These are things that are completely out of your control but you won't know for sure until you run a traceroute. And of course your ISP can change its peering arrangements at any time resulting in a different path to IB.

Anyway I wouldn't sweat over 10ms in latency - 30ms is really good.
 
Quote from nic05:

Well after talking to my bm today, I found out that we are no longer using a t1 at the office after all. Apparently we are trading on a business cable package now. That would explain my rather slow and fluctuating speed test results (the highest i had today was about 8000 kbps down and 488 up ) . The package they have is 10 Mbps down 2 up and the one I would get is 16 down 1.5 up. So I am assuming that I wouldn't have a problem ??
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You won't have any problems at all because your latency is going to be a lot less living in Ontario than BC.

- mnx
 
I used that speak easy test today several times. Even here it hasn't been over 8000 down and about 500 up. I did the test about 100 times now and it is usually around 5000 down 400 up.
 
Quote from gaj:

comcast admitted they slowed down speeds in some areas. that's on record...
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Here's something new I just read about Comcast (linked from Slashdot) : http://systems.cs.colorado.edu/mediawiki/index.php/Broadband_Network_Management

New traffic shaping can disrupt a Comcast Internet connection

Recently, it has been observed that Comcast is disrupting TCP connections using forged TCP reset (RST) packets [1]. These reset packets were originally targeted at TCP connections associated with the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol. However, Comcast has stated that they are transitioning to a more "protocol neutral" traffic shaping approach [2]. We have recently observed this shift in policy, and have collected network traffic traces to demonstrate the behavior of their traffic shaping. In particular, we are able (during peak usage times) to synthetically generate a relatively large number of TCP reset packets aimed at any new TCP connection regardless of the application-level protocol. Surprisingly, this traffic shaping even disrupts normal web browsing and e-mail applications. Specifically, we observe two different types of packet forgery and packets being discarded.
 
Quote from Aaron Copland:

You just need a good fast stable connection, like this.
You can check yours here.

http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/
More...

We are not talking about speed-tests here.
We are talking about "trace-routes", and the latency issues that revolve around the path that our ISP's take to the data-feed servers that we connect to with our brokers. A Speakeasy speed test ( although fun to do ) is not what this discussion has been about.
 
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