Satellite broadband improves for teleworkers

We're at a point where most business people take home-office, high-speed access for granted. But teleworkers and salespeople who operate beyond broadband's reach remain a problem. Although small in number, these users generate a high volume of support calls when they try to remotely access the same network applications as their broadband-equipped colleagues.

Satellite broadband service looks like a big improvement over dial-up. Providers offer ubiquity, giving firms the ability to put all remote workers on the same bill. Newer ka-band technology allows for higher-speed, bidirectional connections and obviates the need to pay for an additional analog line for data uploads.

Yet, the satellite broadband market remains stifled, despite steady growth in remote work. The top two providers, Hughes Network Systems and StarBand, serve only about 200,000 users combined, according to a recent Gartner report.

The cost of customer premises equipment and installation is one cause. But more to blame are performance problems in technology that relies on transmitting signal to a satellite 22,000 miles away. Another big problem is satellite broadband's incompatibility with IPSec VPNs.

Years ago, service providers developed techniques that speed performance and minimize the half-second signal delay that causes pages to load so slowly. Spoofing, or TCP acceleration, tricks a client application into making data send and receive requests to the server before it has made a connection. "Prefetching" loads Web pages all at once, rather than waiting for the client to request components individually.

But for spoofing in particular to work, it needs to see the source and destination of data packets to ensure the connections sync. Because IPSec VPNs hide this information in the encryption layer, the connection knocks down to dial-up speeds.

However, user experience varies. J.P. Carcenac, systems engineering manager with NetScout Systems, has used StarBand to sync up his Microsoft Outlook and SalesLogic clients from airports, various corporate offices and his office in Woodstock, Ill., for two years.

Initially, he couldn't get NetScout's Cisco VPN client to work at all, but upgrading the VPN software solved the problem. With the VPN turned on, Carcenac reports little degradation in download times, but says "interactive applications like Web pages are rather painful regardless of VPN or not."

In contrast, Kyle Rather, SCADA/controls engineer for Tuscarora Gas Transmission Company in Reno, Nev., has experienced extreme performance degradation using a mix of IPSec and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) VPN clients. (SCADA, or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, is systems software used in industrial processes like steel making.) Rather recently set up a network of StarBand-connected PCs that a crew of contractors from different companies used to access their networks.

But because the contractors used a mix of VPN clients, "connections were dreadfully painful," Rather says. "The clients killed the compression algorithm StarBand used, which gave our users 12K bit/sec to 20K bit/sec VPN connections upstream and down. It was easier to set up a few free e-mail accounts and have mail sent there."