"Before the changes, I would dread doing a meeting from 7pm to 9pm because it would be painful and I had a batch in January that were as expected. Now, Teams seems to work so good it is almost as if someone has some serious voodoo going on. I just hoped off one just a minute ago, and it was fast and smooth. Maybe they can do something to adjust what you are seeing? "
I had fewer problems before with Teams, etc.. The optimisation worked in reverse for me. I find workarounds, though, such as phoning into Zoom meetings.
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.
FYI - The speed issues with VPNs are:
1. The security protocols required can't be used in conjunction with the TCP/Web Acceleration techniques being used, so everything basically works at the uncompressed channel rate.
2. There's a lot of handshaking going on, so take your normal 600mS ping rate and basically multiply it for each packet.
As usual, the severity of how slow it can be is generally geometrically proportional to the level of congestion. If you want to get an idea of just how slow and irregular it can be, ssh into a server and try to type commands... it becomes predictive typing waiting for the echo after a while. lol
You are again speculating without any hard data -- since HN does not reveal their optimisation strategies, all you are doing is guessing without any real data to support what amounts to basically an opinion. Not criticising you; you can speculate all you want, but it's nothing more than guesswork.
MrBuster wrote:
- That request they put out asking for user input about work/education related sites they are having trouble with would imply they are intending to give these sites extra priority -- throttling them would be very counter productive to the entire purpose of the effort. After all, they are not putting all this is place to roll out a bunch of new plans with crazy limits and glowing names, right?
Or they could be trying to find out which sites are more problematic, and why, in order to make various tweaks to the system for those sites to better work.
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.
VPNs are iffy with satellite internet and don't work for everyone. Also, i'm fine with Teams or Zoom not working, as they eat up a lot of my data. :)
maratsade wrote:You are again speculating without any hard data -- since HN does not reveal their optimisation strategies, all you are doing is guessing without any real data to support what amounts to basically an opinion. Not criticising you; you can speculate all you want, but it's nothing more than guesswork.
Sure speculation and guess work -- I am sorry the wording was not clear. I do not intend to mislead anyone and I hoped the usage of words like 'appears' would express that. Some routers can show you detailed data usage per device.
So with router logs for every day's activities saved, I can see how much data a device pulled and when it pulled it, how fast it pulled it and the general latency in ms associated with the activity. If I may be so bold as to offer some speculation, it appears that VDS does limit the amount of data that a single device can pull from obvious recreational video sites, and that there is an increase in latency associated with the operation for some reason which may just be coincidence, but when I see that line go up when a device is pulling data and that the line for data amount looks suspiciously like it is leveled off and fairly constant, I just sort of assume "whew -- good thing that VDS is on!"
If I turn off the VDS, the device appears to pull data faster, and the latency numbers drop back down. The device also appears to consume more of my data as many streaming sites seem to jump to a higher resolution, but my eyes are pretty bad. Leaving the VDS off when the crew comes through, even for a brief time, and I usually see several GB disappear to some silly android phone. Of course I do not mean to imply I am sure of this.
It appears the VDS does what the name implies, as I think GabeU had some Fast.com results that showed results comparing data rates with the VDS on/off, but maybe he can clarify. Just by glancing at a graph I feel like I have a pretty good idea if my niece or her family is downloading a video from some site (maybe Netflix?), or streaming from someplace, and I just kind-of/sort-of guess at if the VDS is on or not without actually looking. I do not mean to imply that this is anything other than speculation.
Regarding the interpretation of the policy they posted, sure I could be very mistaken -- probably wrong. I just can't imagine why they would ask users to identify the sites they need improved if they did not want to do something to improve them. But then I am not very imaginative.
grizzle wrote: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.
I think you may have it! The information about when the VDS was switching back on is insightful -- I don't normally go in and deactivate the VDS every day. When the menagerie leave, I turn it off and noticed it was on again based on normal observation and figured it was related to the pandemic measures based on the posted notice. Although I don't use VPN everytime, I often do when I am on a Webex/Teams so this might be the key.
maratsade Could you try a VPN and see if your Teams works better? If this is true then this will be a very welcome solution. I often assume the VPN just slows things down as it does noticeably reduce overall bandwidth.
Thanks!
I think you misunderstood my comment about using VPN. I said using VPN worked better than without, not the other way around.
The reason for this is that the throttling HughesNet imposes based upon sites and content is circumvented when using a VPN.
I think we did understand; it's just that VPNs don't work well for satellite internet, even though they may work for some people (as you demonstrate). For other people, VPNs slow down the network and don't work well.
Not sure what you mean with "the throttling HughesNet imposes based upon sites and content." HN does not throttle sites and content; they throttle speeds when users have used up their data allowance. EDIT: they also conduct network optimisation to improve user experience (though this is subject to congestion and internet latency), and while network optimisation practices are not revealed by the company, throttling is not one of them (except of data when the user has exceeded allowance).
grizzle wrote:I think you misunderstood my comment about using VPN. I said using VPN worked better than without, not the other way around.
The reason for this is that the throttling HughesNet imposes based upon sites and content is circumvented when using a VPN.
Ideally, it would be best to have various users on different beams to try out Teams with VPN and Teams without VPN. I am pretty sure I have been using Teams and Webex both ways, and it seems good both ways but trying under conditions of some congestion would be good to see if this is a factor. I have been pretty busy today, and with ping times flat lined near minimum for satellite until after 9am and staying insanely low until after 3:30pm, I don't think I have had a fair chance of seeing any congestion yet for a fair test. It operated great today, but today was unusually fast judging by the numbers I am looking at.
MarkJFine does have a good point. I have noticed that uploading to an FTP with the VPN can be painful, and fast if I kill the VPN. The reasons he mentioned are spot on.
Anyway, the "throttling" of video is through the VDS, and I am pretty confident of the following speculation regarding the HughesNet optimization strategies*:
*edit
