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Non-Tech : Quote.com QCharts -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: - who wrote (4722)	12/5/1999 3:39:00 AM
From: Gibbons Burke	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17977

Steve - your assertions don't paint a complete picture and are somewhat misleading, with all due respect. While there are currently capacity issues with the quote.com servers this last week (which should be better Monday - servers that go down are resurrected over the weekend, and we are adding capacity as well), many problems users experience have to do with what happens in the chain of linked networks between the user's PC and our servers. Some problems are definitely related to the user's choice of ISP, and Matt's multi ISP solution is a brilliant one. Just this week I was dialed in and my path to our servers went over a major hop named mae-east.att.net. This one very major router on the Internet was showing 55% (!) packet loss, when I ran Ping Plotter (http://www.nessoft.com/). So I right clicked on that hop in Ping Plotter and brought up the Whois information to get the technical contact phone number for that router. I got a number at ATT's network operations center and within 15 minutes after I reported the trouble, the packet loss cleared up. But the important point is that if I had disconnected from my ISP and used another the chances are 90% that my route to the quote.com server would have traversed a different path over the net and avoided that particular traffic jam entirely. What Matt's solution does quite nicely is keep those three different connections going all the time and doing smart routing based on the best path to the server it is connecting to. If one connection gets bogged down, another is used - no need to disconnect from one ISP and connect to another. I think I will see if I can sign up for this myself it sounds so attractive. It appeals to the hedger in me - I like to diversify against any and all risks to my trading and this is exactly along those lines. Thaks Matt for posting this tip. Sipping a milkshake is always faster using two straws than one - especially when a chunk of strawberry clogs one of the straws. -- Gibbons