sjh,
depending on your exact style of trading, a dish might not work for you as there is a 1-2 second latency (delay)... This is not commonly reported in glossy little booklets advertising such services...
This is not strictly speaking accurate. In terms of latency with VSat Technology the Hughes satellites have a policy that is called a "Fair Use" policy. If you exceed what is considered fair use, according to the connectivity package that you bought, you will bumped to the end of the line on uplink requests. The uplink speed (say you bought 56k) usually hovers between 50k and bursts to 128k.
MrMike,
...my own experience with satelite was a nightmare
Satellite technology that is improperly implemented is truly a nightmare. There are very reliable providers nowadays and the technology has matured. We run a number of installations over a number of Caribbean Islands and we have very few problems. The easiest support job I've ever done. In fact, my own installation (Cabarete) has been stable since mid-November last year. I have had no outages whatsoever with signal strength exceeding 80 as the norm. Any of you remember the heavy downpours we had in January. I worked right through the rain and cloud with signal strength deteriorating to 68 minimum. Again, the fellow on the corner with a satellite antenna without the necessary training and field experience will produce a nightmare. This technology needs to be properly implemented with a reputable service provider, pointing to the correct satellite for the area - then it works exceedingly well.
There are benefits to this technology that are not usually part of a DSL/Cable Modem or ISDN technologies. Examples that come to mind is quite good Voice over IP and easily established Virual Private Networks. For me, its the next best thing to my own T1/T3 line which I cannot afford. Its all mine, I can hog all the bandwidth that I want to hog and if I mess up too badly, Hughes sends me to the back of the line and I have to wait a few miliseconds.
