I'm receiving a trial of the Dow Jones news feed via satellite, and have noticed that the feed appears to be delayed at certain times of the day. At the start of trading, the DTN file header timestamp for a given news story is generally within 1 or 2 seconds of the time I receive the news. Usually about an hour later, the lag increases to a half hour or more, then returns to normal. For example, on 7/26, a news file was received at 10:29:46, and the header timestamp was 10:29:46. The next news file with a header timestamp of 10:30:35 wasn't received until 10:48:11. Do you know why this could be happening?

This is due to priority queuing on the satellite channels. With the increases in market data, you will notice delays in news during peak market hours. This is because we give a higher priority to quote traffic. The Satellite feed is a fixed bandwidth service. Thus, we can only fit so much data down the pipe at a time. If the market volume is taking up the majority of the bandwidth, other information will not be able to get through as timely. Our Internet services don't have this issue because they aren't limited by the fixed bandwidth of a satellite channel.

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Jay Froscheiser
DTN - Trading Markets