Accessing VPN poses challenge to rural teleworkers using satellite
Teleworkers should avoid slow and expensive satellite service unless cable, DSL and high-speed wireless are unavailable. It’ll get you online, but VPN access is a challenge.
The satellite-Internet sales pitch to telecommuters is unusually honest: Come to us if you can’t get anything else.
“I always say, cable first for residential customers, then DSL, then high-speed wireless. If none of those three are available, it’s pretty much us,” says Jeff Johnson, who handles technical sales for Nationwide Satellite, which sells and installs the HughesNet satellite service.
Slideshow: taking a look at telework in 2007
It’s not that satellite Internet is terrible. It’s slower than cable and DSL because the signals must travel farther. But satellite potentially will have less downtime, says Gartner analyst Patti Reali, who directs Gartner’s technology and service provider research. She says telecommuters shouldn’t consider satellite unless the only other option is dial-up Internet access. In-orbit satellite failures are rare, and providers can be expected to have backup satellites for emergencies, she says.
Taking the VPN challenge
The big challenge for telecommuters using satellite systems is accessing employer computer systems through virtual private networks (VPN), which use encryption that provides security but also slows down service.
“There is encryption that needs to happen by satellite, which can slow it down,” says Stephanie Lovett, director of marketing for satellite provider WildBlue Communications. “It needs to be encrypted and unencrypted in order to be secure, so it’s going to be slower than cable modem or DSL.”
Speed will drop 50% to 75% when using VPN, Nationwide Satellite’s Johnson says, noting that the performance penalty varies depending on which VPN technology an employer uses. A satellite hookup designed for residential customers won’t have enough bandwidth for most VPN users, he says. Telecommuters thus need to purchase more expensive plans designed for their high-bandwidth needs.
Despite using one of the pricier plans, HughesNet customer Jim Davis says he noticed “quite a bit of degradation” when he accessed his employer’s intranet, although speed improved after his Cisco VPN was upgraded. Davis works from home in Shelbyville, Tenn., 50 miles outside Nashville, as a director of field engineering in the healthcare division of Sage Software Davis switched to satellite in March after relocating to Shelbyville, in a rural area without cable or DSL access. “It’s a little bit slower than my cable [was],” he says. “If you’re running on it just using normal Internet applications, it’s fine. It’s not as fast as cable but it’s acceptable.”
The cost of doing business
Davis says the high cost of satellite is the biggest drawback for him and his employer. Installation and equipment charges were nearly $700 upfront, and the monthly fee is $175, he says. HughesNet prices range from $59.99 to $199 a month, Nationwide Satellite’s Johnson says.
WildBlue prices are $49.95 per month to $149 per month, Lovett says. Enterprise plans start at $79 per month. “The capacity thresholds on a monthly basis are much bigger [for enterprise packages] than the consumer ones,” she says.
DSL may become available to Davis soon, but even though it would cost less, he says it may not be worth switching because he’d be on the outskirts of the network and might get poor performance.
Telecommuters tend to pay more in upfront costs than basic residential customers do, because they need special technology to accelerate VPN usage, says John Beattie, director of enterprise solutions at WildBlue. It’s about $500 upfront just for WildBlue’s equipment and installation, he says. Technology to improve VPN performance comes from such third-party providers as UDcast and XipLink and costs another $500, he adds.
UDcast’s UDgateway appliance secures and accelerates satellite Internet, and handles all VPN-access traffic coming from a corporate site. Addressing, routing, security and caching are handled within the appliance, along with various technologies to improve Internet performance, including a two-way TCP accelerator with acknowledgement-code-signal-suppression, return-path optimization, ramp-up and congestion avoidance, compression, and load balancing. Prefetching and caching strengthen application performance.
Users won’t need to know all the technical details, however. HughesNet customer Pam Gates, a diabetes educator for a pharmaceutical company who telecommutes in Columbia, S.C., never even heard of VPN before she began working from home a few months ago. “I don’t know much about computers,” she says. “It was a little more expensive than if I had cable. Because I can’t get it in my area, it was well worth it.”
Startup costs were about $900 and monthly fees are about $125, Gates says. There was one cloudy weekend when she says she couldn’t get online, but other than that, access has been reliable and reasonably fast.
Satellite users can expect speeds to top out at 1.5M bytes/sec or 2M bytes/sec, Gartner’s Reali says. Cable can give you speeds of 5M bytes/sec or better.
VPN access over satellite has improved in recent years, however, Reali says. “Satellite used to have a lot of problems when it came to VPNs,” she says. “The newer technologies, newer software, IP-based systems, are helping to make that not so much of an issue.”
A place in the world
Satellite probably will have a place in the market for a long time, because cable and DSL aren’t close to covering the whole country, Gartner’s Reali says. WiMAX, however, will pose a key competitive challenge to satellite, she says.
“For the truly remote, on a mountain top, [satellite] is really the only choice,” she says. “The question is ‘what are the buildout plans for these WiMAX technologies?’”
WiMAX and Mobile WiMAX promise to provide high-speed broadband wireless connections for remote users. Sprint Nextel, AT&T and others offer some services to certain parts of the country.
In the satellite market, WildBlue offers newer technology than competitors Starband and HughesNet, because it operates in the Ka band, which provides advanced control of spot beams, Reali says. These beams are supposed to provide better performance than the single, broad beams that cover larger geographical areas. HughesNet also “has ratcheted up their game” in the technology area, and focused on the telecommuter and small-business market, she says. Upgrades that HughesNet has scheduled for the first quarter of 2008 will reduce latency to two-thirds of its current level and add significantly more bandwidth, Nationwide Satellite’s Johnson says.
Still, satellite has limitations that might affect business users. “We do not recommend satellite Internet for online gaming, VoIP, video conferencing or constant high-volume data transfer,” Johnson says.
