ISP Question(s) on speed, reliability

B

BrooksRimes

Currently my ISP is Sprint PCS broadband via a Novatel U720 USB modem.

Another trader said this is not a good setup for intraday trading and that I may be losing ticks. He suggested a direct wired connection which would be Time Warner and roadrunner.com in my area.

Has anyone had actual experience with this situation?

What's an easy way to check if data is being dropped?

If I change to roadrunner, is it ok to use wifi and a wireless router WITHIN my home or is that also liable to lose data?

I'd hate to give up the Sprint aircard as I enjoy working from coffeeshops occasionally.

Brooks
 
Air cards are great for being on the road and great as a redundancy. I've used 'em for both for a long time and have many good things to say about them.

I have never used it as a primary connection.

To check for packet loss just ping your broker's server (if that server will allow it) so you can look for packet loss.

In Windows go to Start/ Run/ cmd/ then on the command prompt type "ping www.mybroker.com" without quotes and where mybroker is your broker or data provider.

I like the 20mb cable modem for primary connectivity.
 
To add:

"ping" by default only does 4 attempts. The packet loss based on 4 attempts may not tell much. You can use the continuous ping:

ping -t www.mybroker.com

to do as many pings as you like. At the end, do a control-C to interrupt. (e.g. 100 times) and the statistics will be from the 100 pings.
 
Quote from Bolimomo:

To add:

"ping" by default only does 4 attempts. The packet loss based on 4 attempts may not tell much. You can use the continuous ping:

ping -t www.mybroker.com

to do as many pings as you like. At the end, do a control-C to interrupt. (e.g. 100 times) and the statistics will be from the 100 pings.
More...

http://www.speedtest.net is also good. Try this from a "hardwired" computer. Click on the gold star for the closest "hub", then try you aircard. 5M down and 3M up should be a minimum for trading. I have 20M down - 8 up with comcast- I hear Concast CA now is offering 50M down.
 
Actually TOS says to use:

ping rainbow.thinkorswim.com -n 100

It came back 100% perfect with an average response time of 172 ms.

Looks good to me.

Brooks
 
Quote from BrooksRimes:

Actually TOS says to use:

ping rainbow.thinkorswim.com -n 100

It came back 100% perfect with an average response time of 172 ms.

Looks good to me.

Brooks
More...

172ms maybe slow depending on where you are. I am 40 ms from Denver to Chi on cable broadband Comcast 20 mg down. When you ping/test from overseas, Europe 200ms or so to Chi is normal. There is a program ping plotter if you look around that will show you data packets traveling from network to network.
 
I have been having some intermittent issues myself, maybe a flakey modem who knows. I did PP from me to TransAct and I got 59 ms but they route my traffic from Denver to Seattle first then Chi ! Probably can't do much but I am going to call Comcast and ask why.
 
Quote from bluebird001:


..... 5M down and 3M up should be a minimum for trading. I have 20M down - 8 up with comcast- I hear Concast CA now is offering 50M down.
More...

I use Comcast cable modem at home and recently often times it has 30 Mbps on download side. I am happy with that speed. But with Comcast, I am not happy that they have occassional outages - more often than I like. DSL is only 5 Mbps download side. But seems to be more stable.

Recently at the hotel in Pasadena, the wifi speed was only 0.5 Mbps on the download side. But I survived the opening bottleneck even at that miserable speed. I breath easier. (I use TradeStation for charting and RealTick for orders.)

Given all things considered, wired connections are definitely better than wireless. Fiber the best, cable modem next, and DSL last. Wireless connection should only be considered as a last resort.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top