Hi alexa. There are quite a few issues related to speed. Here's the short version.
First of all, ping time doesn't apply to what we're doing. I don't know about any competitors, but all of our stuff is push based. So you can cut that time in half right off the bat.
Second, ping time is an ideal latency time. So many other things can get in the way. TI Pro uses a proprietary data aggregation and compression algorithm to ensure that our data comes to you at the fastest possible speed.
The industry standard seems to be HTTP. We work with a lot of brokers on their trading APIs, and most of them are HTTP. HTTP often requires two round trips for even a simple request. So even if your only looking at ping time, you'd have to double the number you see. So we're already a factor of 4 better than the industry standard. Of course, that's still an ideal number. Those extra HTTP servers will add additional steps that you can't measure with ping. You said you get a 45ms ping time to yahoo. I bet it takes more than 45ms for yahoo's home page to load in your browser! Ping time is not the final answer on speed!
Finally, you need to consider how much time you can spare. Are you doing fully automatic trading? If so, colocation may be an answer. Please let us know who your broker is, and that will help us estimate how fast that part of the connection is. If, like most of our users, you are reading the alerts on the screen, these numbers are too small to worry about. Even if the 90ms time was accurate (and I just explained why it is not) you still couldn't read the new alerts in that time. Look up "human reaction time" on Google. You'd be lucky to turn your head that fast when an alert comes in.
As for your question about why the ping times look the way they do, that can depend on a number of factors, like geography, and wether we use the same ISP. While there may be ways to reduce the ping time slightly, that's seldom the best way to make any real progress. I'd start by finding out if your broker's trading software is the fastest around. There's a huge range of different speeds out there, and these differences are much larger than the ping times you mentioned.
As for your question about getting faster data, that's unlikely. We are built for speed. Even if something else was faster, it couldn't be much faster. There just isn't much time wasted here.
If you can't be satisfied with this response you have to try the others for yourself.
