Forum Discussion
Re: ""...we are increasing the amount of available capa..." - lighthope1
lighthope1 - Yes, they have been. It's funny though, isn't it? I've been forced to use HughesNet for years, and have complained for years, and have been told repeatedly there's nothing they can do....
In terms of VDS, starting around April and up until a couple weeks ago, toggling off VDS was not permanent. You could toggle it off at any point through the day, and it would remain off, until midnight, at which point it would reset and turn itself back on. I had to turn it off each day.
It does seem however that within the past couple weeks this change was reverted back to its old functionality - I toggled it off and it hasn't reset itself again yet.
In terms of Teams, Zoom, and media streaming, I have found everything works best when running through a VPN. Without the VPN, I have had some services, websites, and apps that would take extremely long times to load, or simply timeout. Upload speeds when trying to share out files were non-existent, and again many times timeout. Once I began using a VPN, speeds seemed to balance out and "work better" - at least on my two computers. Unfortunately all my other home devices cannot run through VPN, so continue to be excessively slow or non-functional due to timeouts.
grizzle wrote:...
In terms of Teams, Zoom, and media streaming, I have found everything works best when running through a VPN. Without the VPN, I have had some services, websites, and apps that would take extremely long times to load, or simply timeout. Upload speeds when trying to share out files were non-existent, and again many times timeout. Once I began using a VPN, speeds seemed to balance out and "work better" - at least on my two computers. Unfortunately all my other home devices cannot run through VPN, so continue to be excessively slow or non-functional due to timeouts.
I gave Team a try without running a VPN just to get an idea if I would see a difference, and I must say Teams was amazing this morning as well. Of course, this is the morning, and it is generally less busy, but judging by the latency graph there seemed to be a bit more going on this morning. Yesterday it felt like a ghost town with the latency measures riding near minimum for satellite for me all morning.
Some years ago, I saw a website where a knowledgeable fellow shared a formula to calculate bandwidth from point A to point B given a number of values for variables to plug in -- like the latency and size of the TCP window (how much data the other site will push your way without getting an acknowledgement) Of course, as MarkJFine alluded to, satellite gateways have some complications like compression and some kind of super cache so that they can keep the stream of data moving your way since the lag of going over the satellite can cause really poor performance if the server at the other side is stingy with how much they will send without getting that ack. As Mark mentioned, with the VPN on, it is pretty hard be able to leverage caching and compression so VPN with satellite is generally regarded as more punishing to your available bandwidth than for non-satellite.
Anyway, that fellow advocated for estimating bandwidth and being more sparing in the use of real bandwidth tests in order to conserve bandwidth. He had some pithy statement -- I probably am getting this wrong -- but it was something like: It is better to estimate the bandwidth than to run a bandwidth test to know the bandwidth -- because when you run a bandwidth test you know your available bandwidth is always 0. Somehow my paraphrase seems way more verbose and has less impact....
Perhaps others will chime in with their results with Teams with VPN and without VPN. It seemed good either way for me.
Here's what the support page has: https://support.hughesnet.com/en/faq/internet/can-i-run-vpn-over-hughesnet
Of note: "HughesNet Technical Support does not provide help with configuring or troubleshooting problems associated with VPN clients."
Mileage varies widely when it comes to VPNs. They work for some and not at all for others.
