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Cable MAY give you faster speed than DSL. Your data transfer speeds will depend on factors such as how many cable subscribers are sharing your cable link to the cable headend. Cable bandwidth is shared, so if there are a lot of subscribers active on your cable link, you are competing with them for bandwidth. When cable companies cite maximum bandwidth that means you COULD (maybe) get that bandwidth if there isn't too much competition for bandwidth, at the moment.
There are other factors to consider in addition to bandwidth. For example, I used to have cable modem service from Comcast. Some of my emails to others were being rejected and some emails from others to me were being rejected. Sometimes emails to me were just dropped and the sender had no notification that their email was not going to be sent to me. I spent months trying to convince various technical support people that I had a problem. You should have heard all the different explanations of what I was doing wrong that caused others to not be able to send me email. In the end Comcast's only "solution" was that I must use their web-based email in order to get dependable email service in either direction. They claimed that Comcast does not support any email client program, only web based email. For me, this was an unacceptable situation so I switched to Verizon DSL service.
Verizon had its own set of problems getting things to work, but once my DSL was finally up and running, I was happy. I did have one occasion that an email being sent to me was rejected back to the sender. I have a theory about that, but I won't bore you with it. Suffice it to say that Verizon's DSL service has been more reliable than Comcast's (think of all the times when your cable TV service stopped for a while - would you like your Internet service to have the same type of reliability?). My DSL has a lower maximum throughput. It doesn't matter - the actual throughput is fast enough compared to the actual throughput I received with Comcast cable modem service. Also, my DSL service is less expensive than cable modem was. My only regret is that I gave Comcast so much time to try to make things right when they were either unwilling, unable or both, to accomplish that.
Paul
Saturday, November 25, 2006, 12:38:17 PM, you wrote:
I've used DSL for years at 1 Mbps up and down, and have been happy
with it using Interactive Brokers and TradeStation 2000i. Due to
service provider changes it seems it may be better now to switch to
cable at 5 Mbps down 256 K up, or, cable 10 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up
for an additional fee.
Any thoughts on advantages and disadvantages for cable or DSL for
online trading?
Even with the lower download speed, I've liked DSL because the line is
dedicated and not shared. Does upload speed matter for trading?
Thanks for any opinions.
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