The best deals for DSL or Internet cable?

Quote from electron:

What are the best deals in the continental US for DSL or Internet cable these days?

Planning to switch to DSL this month as my trading business expands and I need more reliability. Although my dial-up has been pretty good, a faster bandwidth may not be a bad idea after all.

Any ideas?

TIA.
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Having used both, and if you have a choice, the most important thing to do before making a decision is have them test the line. "Advertised" speeds can be misleading.

I bundle DSL with my phone through Bellsouth and it runs about $40 a month @ 1.5 MB down (but I got about $150 in rebates and other junk when I signed up.)

Cable bundle runs about the same, but when I checked the speed for Time Warner it sucked vs. DSL.

When I had Comcast, it was ultra-fast 2-2.5 MB down.

Bottom line, have a tech come out to confirm the speed at your location to be sure.

Either way, it will be night and day versus dial-up.
 
This is a hard question to answer from a theoretical point of view as it relates to trading. But practically, it does not matter and if it did, you would not be asking the question because you would need a T1 or more if it were _really_ relevant.

Unless you need a big pipe, and the asymmetry of the pipe is not an issue, then cable is superior. If you do not need a big pipe, and latency and a symmetric connection is important, then DSL would be the better choice.

What is funny is that for most of the people at ET that are trading say one to five symbols, you probably cannot do any better than a dialup connection! If bandwith was not an issue, I would just use dialup for trading one to five symbols!

These arguments are only for dsl vs cable. If you bring T1's and PTP T1's into the mix, then it's whole another ball game.

nitro
 
Quote from nitro:

What is funny is that for most of the people at ET that are trading say one to five symbols, you probably cannot do any better than a dialup connection! If bandwith was not an issue, I would just use dialup for trading one to five symbols!

nitro
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It's hard to disagree with that. I have done very well on just a dial-up. One of the reasons I am switching to DSL is that IB is getting less and less reliable and I am afraid that I might end up calling in to close my positions, so it's good to have a phone line free and be on the Internet at the same time to monitor the connection to IB. Just a small safety measure that I believe is necessary considering that I am increasing my stake at this game.

BTW, does IB charge extra for closing/managing the position over the phone if necessary? Probably so. Anyone knows the amount of damage in such a case?
 
Get this connection, it flies. Customer service is KILLER. If I ever had a problem they took care of it. I didnt have to dial through 30 F***in menus to get to a customer service rep. In addition they actually know technology not like SBCucks.

If you want personalized attention you can get a business plan with a dedicated service rep for a little extra.
 
If you're in an area serviced by SBC you can get up to 6Mbps on DSL, but you've got to be within 7500ft of the CO.

RCN offers a 5Mbps cable solution in NYC and Chicago.

I have both and I prefer the DSL. I agree that the tech support is lacking with SBC(India or Sri Lanka), but not much better with the cable providers I've dealt with.
 
I now have 6008/608 DSL from SBC with 5 static IPs. I pay $100 for this service.

One thing to ask when getting DSL is to have them check if there is extra unnecessary wiring. From what I understand, you may actually have up to a mile more of extra wiring that would affect what service you get. Where I am at now it is as clean as a whistle, but if were not I would have asked that they physically rewire me.

I also strongly recommend that you run pingplotter or some other graphical traderoute tool for a few days contini\ously to all the important servers that you use. I did this to the 4 or 5 servers that are crucial to me, and found some misconfigured routers at one of the hops. There is a funny story related to this:

The bad router was from Sprint. I called SBC to inform them of the problem and requested they route me around it. They said there was nothing they could do (I knew that's bullshit but whatever) so I sent an email to the sprint technical support telling them of their misconfigured router. I saw daily that they were trying to fix the router, but to no avail. One day I come in and I see that _SBC_ had re-routed around the bad router, exactly what they claimed they could not do - LOL. On the downside, they had to add an extra hop, but overall, my internet connection smokes both in speed and in latency.

nitro
 
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