Quote from alanm:
I would be against tick-by-tick data, if only because IB is already very stingy with the amount of data they will let you see, in comparison to other firms. It stands to reason that doubling the number of ticks would result in having to live with 20 symbols instead of 40 (or 80 instead of 160, or whatever).
In a study I did recently, I showed that the "volume" data that people felt was so critical that IB should supply now accounts for 17% of the total download bandwidth. For those of us that just want to trade, and already have a proper quote and charting package, this was a huge waste of capacity. I'd rather have had 20% more symbols available.