Dial Up access to IB?

E

El Cazador

I am using DSL (works great) to connect to my IB account but I saw someone state that as long as you are only following several stocks then dial up was an option to consider with IB.

Question: Is there anyone who has been doing dial up (56K Modem or less) to trade at IB for any time that would recommend it? I have this fantasy about moving to a rural area and buying a house for very little and trading by dial up or dial up and satelitte. Do I need a big pipe for IB? Thanks
 
IB takes very little bandwidth.. In fact most internet software takes little bandwidth. I did use a 33.6 dial up [much more stable than 56K depending on modem/ISP compatibility] to IB, eSignal and later QCharts and chat etc... no problemo.

IB does not use level II [many level II active at the same time can take more of the pipe].
It is easy to check, when you have a modem it is possible to check how many bytes are received per second. Trading software usually takes less than 1.5KB per sec [average is more like 0.8 in the setup I described] which is very confortable with dial up.

People do not usually realize that 33.6 or 56 is a lot of data per sec and quotes easily compress too [automatically through the modem].

So yes, you can do it that way, dial up that is. You will miss the speed for web surfing of course !

Now I have a cable access and lucky I must be almost alone on my node here ! :) So I use the extra pipe for voice chat to friend traders.

I must point out that the real advantage of Cable or ADSL is the permanent connection. The fact that you can hardly loose the connection. Depending on your dial up ISP, you may experience poor stability and that's bad.
This is why my 56 modem was used only in 33.6 mode [much more reliable on the wire and with the ISP I had].
But if you have a stable dial up connection [never interrupted for 8 hours or more], then speed is no issue for trading. In fact, I have also noticed broadband connection sometime suffer many 'hops' on the route to the destination, resulting in small delays [milliseconds] while, the good old dial up would use a more direct internet route without these delays [without the speed of course].

vpiNeo
 
I cant believe so many people praise cable for not being able to loose a connection. What the heck is wrong with my providers local connection? (At&t)

Connection is lost all the time. Sometimes 10 minutes, sometimes 2 minutes, sometimes all day long! Every day I loose connection for at least 5 to 10 minutes during the trading day.

I live in an area with alot of homes using cable access. Could that be the problem?

I get jelous everytime I hear someone talk about how good their cable access is. Why cant mine just work?! :)
 
Yep,
that's THE problem with cable. Performance depends on where you are precisely. There is no other way than trying and then again, it can deteriorate when more users get connected later on.

A good 33.6 modem dial up is much better than a poor cable connection :(

If you have ADSL available you may try it.

BTW, in my earlier post, these solutions and delays might be unacceptable when you do scalping or market making like trading. But in that case the good solution are very expensive [frame relays etc]. You can still succeed with lesser connections I guess, but you are at a disadvantage against traders who want your money.

I think than for any other type of trading, my comments stand.

vpiNeo
 
tntneo hit the nail on the head. IB compresses data pretty well and if your dialup connection is good, trading should be no problem. I'd recommend that if two ISP services are availale on different backbones you should join both in order to have a backup.

However, some ISP's have a habit of delivering poor connections and lots of packet loss. You'll have to do your homework to find someone reliable.
 
Cool... so I can get 1 phone line for a computer running IB and 1 for a computer running qcharts and have adequate bandwidth with redundancy. I like it!
 
I use IB with cable but when I travel I log into ATT Worldnet (which has a lot of national numbers) dial up. No problems at all other than the occational disconnects that come with dial up. I sometimes have problems if I try to open too many things at once, but in general it worksd fine.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top