GATrader: Unless they've re-engineered gr8Trade in the last few months, you won't be able to use it over a 56K dialup. Even if you have some bandwidth, it's not clear how much it will suck up. Perhaps a gr8trade user can comment.
I demo'd it for a few weeks, and it would do OK (but see below) during the pre-market, but at 09:30 EDT, it would suddenly swamp my poor 56K dialup, sucking about 10Kb/sec through it (max bandwidth, 2x compressed), and was basically unusable, since it apparently needed far more bandwidth than that. This is despite not having _any_ windows open (no news, monitors, L2s, etc.). You hit it the nail on the head - they apparently are sending the entire quote feed for all symbols to the workstation software, and letting _it_ filter out what the user tells it to, instead of doing the filtering at the server. When you're in the same office as the server, this isn't so bad (though it still takes up a ton of bandwidth, increases packet collisions, etc. on anything but a "star-topology" network). However, it just doesn't make any sense over a dialup.
In their defense, they do say that you "may have trouble" unless you have a broadband connection. I don't see any way at all it can work, though, except over broadband. Neither could they, when it came down to it.
Using it during the pre-market and after-hours sessions, I had constant problems with quotes missing from the market-minder/level II/order-book thing, and the news window would also routinely stall. When I reported this, they had to restart their news server.
Their commissions are closer to those of ticket shops than someone like IB. That may be fine if you do a small number of large trades, but IB's commissions (and execution platform) rule otherwise.
