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Learn — network path

Network path to broker explained — what happens between your click and the fill.

When you click buy on MT4, the order does not travel directly to your broker's matching engine. It passes through a series of routers, carriers, and peering points before arriving at the data centre where the fill happens. Each step is a hop. Each hop is a potential source of variance.

Understanding the path explains why two traders with the same ISP speed can experience different fill quality — and why the route, not the bandwidth, is what matters.

See the plansLatency and jitter guide
10–18
Typical hop count from a home connection to a broker's data centre.
Transit
Shared carrier networks your data passes through before reaching the broker.
Path
The route matters more than the speed — a clean path beats a fast noisy one.

What happens between click and fill

When you submit an order, your trading platform sends a TCP packet from your machine to your router. Your router forwards it to your ISP's local exchange. Your ISP hands it to their transit network — shared infrastructure that carries data for many customers simultaneously. That transit network eventually hands your packet to a peering point, where it crosses from one carrier's network to another's. Eventually it reaches the data centre where your broker's matching engine runs — typically Equinix LD4 in London for most retail forex brokers — and the fill is processed. The same path in reverse returns the confirmation to your screen.

Each of those handoffs is a hop. Tracerouting to your broker's server hostname shows every hop and the latency to each one. The total round-trip time is the sum of every hop's delay on both directions of the journey.

Why the path varies

Residential ISPs do not route your traffic on a fixed path. The path from your ISP to your broker's data centre changes based on traffic loads, peering agreements, and what your carrier has decided is the most efficient route that day. A path that goes directly from your ISP to the data centre network on a quiet Tuesday may route through an additional transit carrier during a busy morning when congestion causes your ISP to reroute traffic. You would not notice this as a user checking email. You would notice it as a trader watching fills.

How a proxy changes the path

A proxy node at or near your broker's data centre connects to the broker's matching engine via a short, direct, dedicated path. Instead of your trading data travelling 10-18 hops through variable transit networks, it travels through the residential path to the proxy node — and then just a few hops through the data centre network to the matching engine. The variable transit section is replaced with a consistent direct connection. That is the routing improvement the priority route provides.

How to trace your actual path

Run tracert [your-broker-hostname] on Windows or traceroute [your-broker-hostname] on Mac. Count the hops. Look for where latency jumps sharply — that is where a transit handoff is adding delay. If the same hop shows high variance across multiple runs, that is a jitter source on your path.

The simple version

Your order travels further than you think before reaching the matching engine.

The route from your desk to your broker's server is not a single cable. It is a chain of handoffs across multiple networks, each operating independently and each introducing its own variability. A residential ISP connection routes through this chain with no guarantees about consistency.

A proxy replaces the variable middle section with a dedicated, direct segment. That is not a minor optimisation — it is the removal of the part of the path that is most likely to change under load.

  • More hops means more potential variance in the round-trip time.
  • The transit section — between ISP and data centre — is the most variable part.
  • A proxy node at the data centre removes the transit variable entirely.
FAQ

The network path is the series of network hops your trading data takes from your machine through your ISP, their transit network, and one or more peering points before reaching the data centre where your broker's matching engine runs.

Typically 10-18 hops for a home-to-broker connection. Each hop is a router at a network boundary where your data is handed off from one carrier to another. More hops means more potential variance, though the number alone does not determine jitter.

A proxy replaces the variable residential path with a dedicated, direct connection from a node near the broker's data centre. Instead of 10-18 hops through shared transit, your trading traffic takes a shorter, uncongested route from the proxy node to the matching engine.