I talked to someone at S&P Comstock today. They don't offer free trials, and I am not willing to switch without a free trial. You can try it for a month and pay for only that month, but "no thanks". I would have to keep my current service to make sure that I have quotes, so I would be paying for two services for a month.
Quite a bit more costly than PC Quotes. They aren't doing the right thing on the Internet feed, either. They are using a single backbone provider, and a second-tier one at that - BBN Planet. The salesperson talked-up BBN's ties to AT&T and tried to sound convincing. I asked about backup/secondary Internet access. He said they were going to add UUNet. I asked him if he knew why they were getting so many PC Quotes customers signing up lately? (He said they had 15 this week.) D U H!
I did some traceroutes and pings (I had the salesperson get an IP address from their technical people), and, although it wasn't as bad as PCQuote, there was packet loss, and it was quite a long path for me.
WHY DON'T THESE QUOTE VENDORS GET IT?! YOU HAVE TO DO THE SAME THING TO RUN AN EFFECTIVE QUOTE SITE THAT YOU HAVE TO DO TO RUN A BIG WEB SITE! God, these people are stupid!
Look at what the big web sites do. Multiple backbones, to get the shortest path to the largest number of users. Directly on MAJOR backbones. Many of the really big sites (Yahoo, Netscape, Playboy, why, even Silicon Investor :)) use Internet Systems (http://www.isi.net - go there and at least read how they do it) for hosting. They use multiple geographically-dispersed servers and connect very directly to major backbones and NAPs. (Traceroute any of the sites I've listed. Then do it from a different ISP.) I'm sure that ISI could host RealTick III servers.
These idiots think that they can connect to a single backwater ISP and provide reliable service. THEY CAN'T.
The problem isn't so much that it isn't possible to provide reliable quotes over the Internet - it's just that nobody so far realizes how to do it or isn't willing to spend the $$$ to do it right. |
