Irby,
There are some combinations of this that can make for a very vulnerable system. Some brokers are now running as data providers by buying a data feed one place, software another, and then are setting up a computer operations center. So now you have this chain of feeds, hardware, and communications spread over multiple sites and responsible parties.
Normally (because of costs) a broker (or even some data vendors) start up with a T1. When it fails, all their users are now dead in the water. As they add users they start exceeding the capacity of the T1. So they order another one and wait for the phone companies' unbelievably long lead time to install it while all their users are screaming about brown-outs. Of course, everyone blames this on the internet and that its not ready for prime time. If the software fails, they've got to call back to the software vendor, get their attention, and debug the problem from a remote site. If its a data problem, its back to the data provider who probably looks at their own internal system and says everything looks fine here. The system becomes only as good as weakest link in the chain.
There are numerous threads all over SI littered with complains about Brokers as data providers.
At DBC we attacked this problem differently. For all US data we have direct connections to the exchanges. We run dual ISP T3s. We have multiple computer sites with power backups. We have dozens (yes that's dozens!) of software engineers and computer operators running our systems 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. We designed the software. Our Internet Active Push technology compresses and has error checking built into the data packets. With the latest versions we built fault tolerance into it from the server to the clients so it automatically knows how to recover.
We also built it as an open platform. The Data Manager supports DDE connections and third party software. We are working closely with major software providers to use this platform. This means multiple software applications can be run at the same time on one PC.
Yes, sometimes $79 a month seems like a lot of money for a real time system with so much for free on the Internet, but we have invested wisely to provide the best streaming quote system possible.
Chuck T.
CTO, DBC
dbc.com
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