T2W Trading Community

Connectivity

As a trader, you cannot afford not to be in touch with the markets. Your PC’s connection to the internet is therefore of paramount importance, and should be given a good deal of consideration in the grand scheme of things.

As an example, a dial-up connection will take around 7 seconds to download a typical web page (based on a size of 50kb). A 512k broadband connection will display the same page in about 0.7 seconds. If you’re downloading larger files or data – say 1Mb of intraday data – with dialup you’re going to be waiting for perhaps 4 minutes. 512k broadband will have the files on your desktop in about 25 seconds.

• Dial Up

  The most basic connection is dial up, which will normally use your PC’s internal modem and gives a connection speed of around 56k. You normally have a choice of pay-as-you-go on a per-minute basis, or pay in advance per month (from around £10-12) and use it as much as you like during the month. Most ISP’s put a 2-hour cap on usage for dial up accounts however, and you’ll be automatically cut off after 2 hours, requiring you to reconnect. If you’re in the market at the time you lose the connection, it could be a worrying minute or so whilst your PC re-establishes the connection.

• ISDN

  The next jump up in connectivity is ISDN, which – in theory – gives a connection of 128k. This speed is only achieved, however, by splitting the line in two, and to get the 128k speed you must use both lines. Hence, if you’re on the phone and the internet at the same time, you’re only going to get 64 k speeds – little better than dial-up, although admittedly with the added bonus of still being able to use the phone.

• ADSL

  For those of us in the UK who live in a broadband-enabled area, the most obvious choice for trading is ADSL – or broadband. A lot of ISP’s now offer a 128k or 256k connection using ADSL, but for around £20/month you can get “full-speed” 512k connection – around 10 times the speed of dialup, with no cutoff period and vastly improved performance all round.

  

  512k is considered “the norm” in the UK for broadband currently. If you’re willing to pay a little more (£30 upwards per month) you can get double the speed by having a 1GB connection. Files download twice as fast, there are normally no usage limits (unlike some 512k ISP providers) and its all you should ever really need.

  However - faster connection speeds are available; some ISPs in certain areas of the UK are now offering ADSL at speeds of up to 8Mbps (that’s 8,192k – sixteen times faster than normal broadband, and a whopping 146 times faster than dialup).

  There is an excellent, free guide to ADSL and an explanation of the technology used, along with a list of FAQ’s available here.

• Satellite Broadband

  Around 80% of the UK can currently receive broadband. If you’re not in that 80%, you can either go back to good old dialup/ISDN, or if your pockets are a little deeper, you might want to think about satellite broadband.

  BT are one of a handful of ISP’s who now offer a satellite broadband service, which you might find of benefit if you’re in a non-ADSL area, and you’ve got clear line of sight to the sky. The connection speeds aren’t quite as fast as regular ADSL – 512kbps down speed, but only 128kbps up speed (half the norm), and of course its more expensive, around £60/month at the time of writing.

  The latency (the time it takes the data to travel) involved in satellite 500 is also higher than regular ADSL, but if you really can’t live with dialup, it might be worth considering.

  You can visit the BT website here to find out more.

  Other satellite ISP’s are available.