Quote from nononsense:
I think you are right chisel. Assuming latency is OK, I would almost dear to say that 28kbps would do as well as 256kbps talking about "Sending an order". Maybe I get some flak on this from people who know better. I have been going for years now on high speed connections!
I have to fully concur on this, I was just about to write exactly the same thing.
However, I can testify this first-hand, since I used to trade off a 28K connection for a good 2 years, so plenty of reference base.
1500K, 56K, 28K, 14K, it doesn't matter. Your orders should be maybe a few hundred bytes at best, you could probably place them real-time from an old mobile phone without bandwidth problems.
That said though, again it's not the bandwidth, but the speed (ping) you get the order in with. That's all that matters. I have a T-DSL (1.5mbps) now, but that hasn't increased my order speed. It has only increased the number of tapes, depths and charts I can have open.
When you look at your orders being water, it's a few drops through the hose at best, even with the narrowest connection.
However, that said, once your bandwidth is fully exhausted, latency can change, too, because you now need to queue the information packets you're trying to send/receive, which then means serial instead of parallel processing, and can mean a considerable time delay (like queing in German departments).
Hope that clarifies things well enough.