Had to send the sat-man packing

[jakedeez]

Okay - so my parents have this house up the side of a mountian in the middle of no where (sperryville VA)

They need broadband as they want to move out here for a majority of the time - however I can't figure out what to get. We had a satalite installer here today, but I had to send him packing, as Sat wouldn't allow my pops to access his office VPN....

I would like to try and stay below the cost of T1 - any ideas?

 

[AndyinNYC]

This answer may be farfetched and impossible, but ...

The original Linksys WRT54Gs allowed third party software to be installed, one of the features of this software was to boost the antenna strength and other settings.

I believe Sveasoft has the router being used with a wired connection 2-3 miles away.

If someone down the mountain but in line of sight has a fast connection or the ability to buy one, it might make sense to negotiate an account at their site for your use.

Cost would be 2 routers plus the monthly DSL/cable charges.


I can't find a link to the website which described the connection.

Andrew

 

[Atheus]

Why wouldn't you be able to access the VPN with satellite? It's just a method of transmission, it shouldn't affect the internet at all... the company must be specifically blocking the required ports. Try another company.

 

[jakedeez]

Originally posted by: Atheus
Why wouldn't you be able to access the VPN with satellite? It's just a method of transmission, it shouldn't affect the internet at all... the company must be specifically blocking the required ports. Try another company.

has to do with the lag between up and down due to the satellite being 22k miles away

 

[Atheus]

So it would be high latency, but it would still be accessable... right? Unless it was so slow the server actually timed out waiting for replies, but that would take many seconds.

Edit: now that I think about it again, even if the sat was 22k miles away ( I highly doubt it, as that is almost the whole circumference of the earth) it would only add 0.23s latency.

 

[jakedeez]

Originally posted by: Atheus
So it would be high latency, but it would still be accessable... right? Unless it was so slow the server actually timed out waiting for replies, but that would take many seconds.

According to the tech and the installer you run into the problem that satalite can not send and recieve at the same time, and that ther eis a lag between - since my dad is trying to log onto a critix VPN and a virtual machine, idk if he will be able to since he would need simultanious up and down...

 

[Atheus]

I really can't see how it could fail to work if TCP works, and TCP must work, or the web wouldn't. Performance will be poor, yes, but not as bad as dialup which is your only other viable option. If it turns out it doesn't work, then I'm an idiot, but you should _still_ get the satellite over dialup and use SSH to access resources at work.

 

[jakedeez]

Originally posted by: Atheus
I really can't see how it could fail to work if TCP works, and TCP must work, or the web wouldn't. Performance will be poor, yes, but not as bad as dialup which is your only other viable option. If it turns out it doesn't work, then I'm an idiot, but you should _still_ get the satellite over dialup and use SSH to access resources at work.

I hear what your saying, but we will not get satellite if it won't work for my father to long into his VPN - which it won't because the satellite uplink goes dorment when not activly moving data up or down - and that is why you can't log into the VPN - you have to keep the link active 100% of the time, its not that there can't be short timeouts but rather that there always has to be data flowing, so that even if there is a lag it in th middle of the data, not attemting to reestablish the connection every time you switch from upstreme to down...

 

[nweaver]

Don't do consumer wireless, for the love of all....

You can get 10 Miles with some tranzio (sic?) 5.8 Ghz radios and paroblic antenna. but wait, wireless isn't full duplex, and adds latency too....

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Atheus
So it would be high latency, but it would still be accessable... right? Unless it was so slow the server actually timed out waiting for replies, but that would take many seconds.

Edit: now that I think about it again, even if the sat was 22k miles away ( I highly doubt it, as that is almost the whole circumference of the earth) it would only add 0.23s latency.

Geostationary orbit

Depending on the company it can add as much as 800ms. Plus, at least one company made heavy use of NAT and/or proxies.

 

[GeekDrew]

You're correct that satellite is almost always a no-no for VPN use. I've heard of them working on occasion, but even then, not very well. Many people have recommended dialup instead of Satellite internet for VPN use.

If you stroll over to BroadBandForums, there are a few example setups in the DirecWay forum about alternatives. IIRC, they all have to do with line-of-sight of alternate services. They can be miles away, but must be LOS.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

We use satellite. And it can use VPN, but at VERY SLOW rates. (we have Direcway btw). When you use VPN, data cant be sent simultaneously, info must be sent 1 packet at a time over 1400ms latency. Timeouts happen VERY frequently. You will also find BT run very slowly. (Torrents you guys say you get 600KB+ on is 5-10KB a second for us) Same thing with peer to peer networks. Plus (though I haven't fully confirmed it yet) it doesn't seem to support UDP protocol.

 

[Landstandr]

When I lived in the middle of nowhere and cable/DSL wasn't available, I was still able to get an ISDN line. It wasn't cheap and it had to be provisioned out of a different telco office, but it was better than nothing. The throughput isn't high (128k) but the latency is nice and low and working remotely wasn't that bad.

 

[EatSpam]

Originally posted by: Landstandr
When I lived in the middle of nowhere and cable/DSL wasn't available, I was still able to get an ISDN line. It wasn't cheap and it had to be provisioned out of a different telco office, but it was better than nothing. The throughput isn't high (128k) but the latency is nice and low and working remotely wasn't that bad.

ISDN does seem like a good idea. Citrix ICA is actually very low bandwidth, it just works better with a low latency connection.

 

[Thoreau]

Originally posted by: thecoolnessrune
We use satellite. And it can use VPN, but at VERY SLOW rates. (we have Direcway btw). When you use VPN, data cant be sent simultaneously, info must be sent 1 packet at a time over 1400ms latency. Timeouts happen VERY frequently. You will also find BT run very slowly. (Torrents you guys say you get 600KB+ on is 5-10KB a second for us) Same thing with peer to peer networks. Plus (though I haven't fully confirmed it yet) it doesn't seem to support UDP protocol.

It has to support it in one way or another, or DNS resolution wouldn't function.

 

[Rilex]

I'd say dual channel ISDN as well. Very low latency (about the same as cable was a fair few years back) with a decent speed (max of roughly 14Kbps) and Citrix/RDP should be fairly smooth.