I made the opposite move to the one you are considering, but I think my experience might shed some light on your questions.
A couple of months ago, I switched from Verizon DSL to FiOS. The increase in speed, both up and down, has been enormous. Movies are way better now, but I can’t say that I’ve seen any change in the performance of my trading platform.
Here are the details. I live a long way from my local telephone company central office, which is a big deal for a DSL customer, but doesn’t matter to a fiber-optic customer. My DSL service was supposed to give me “up to” 3 Mbps in download speed; but, because of my distance from the central office (over 17,000 feet), I was lucky when I got 1.5 Mbps.
When I switched to FiOS, Verizon would not guarantee any particular speed, but said the service would provide “up to” 15 Mbps download speed, and “up to” 5 Mbps upload speed. I have run numerous speed tests since the changeover, and my download speed averages 14.89 Mbps and my upload speed averages 5.06 Mbps.
Needless to say, I am happy with a 10-fold increase in speed. But, it hasn’t affected my trading.
I don’t scalp. So, because of the way I place orders, I don’t think I would even notice a fraction of a second delay in order execution. And I’m only a few hundred miles from FXCM’s servers in the northeastern U.S. I think both of those facts probably matter in the discussion of lag-time between trader and broker.
I [I]upgraded from DSL[/I], and didn’t see any increase in the performance of my trading platform.
I suspect that you could [I]downgrade to DSL[/I], and not see any decrease in trade-execution speed.