I would prefer not to use a third party provider because of the IP backbone. My experience has been witht eh third party providers is that there is not enough responsiveness (packet loss issues) to burstable traffic at market open and close. Unfortunately when the third party networks were designed there was no forethought into the need for market data traffic or multicast.
Hmmm... well I happen to work in Engineering at Radianz. I can assure that our network was designed for multicast so that there are two resilient low latency paths for multicast traffic throughout our network in spite of the tendency of IP to have a single best path. And our basic design rules for network capacity worldwide are to allow for the bursts that happen at U.S. Market Open. The advice to go to a 3rd party provider who specializes in the financial services industry is a good one because we and our competitors tend to understand the special needs of companies in that industry. If you want to discuss this further with one of our technical sales support people, then send me an email and I'll put you in touch. --Michael Dillon