To increase the total bandwidth and having a faster way for offside backups and communication. The decision was made to test skyDSL 20Mbit down and 6Mbit up Flat L. This is a flat rate connection which offers up to 20 Mbit downstream and 6 Mbit upstream. This bandwidth is achieved by using a bi-directional satellite uplink. Another nice feature this connection comes with a static IP address.
First thing to do was to get the sat dish mounted on the wall and pointed in the exact right direction. this is a question of millimeters.
The quite strange looking ViaSat RM4100 Modem. It’s getting really hot. I hope that won’t be an issue soon.
Here is a screenshot from the modems GUI, showing the signal strength.
The TRIA gets quite hot even with only about 10C° outside.
First bandwidth testing had the outcome of about 18Mbit to 20Mbit, pretty much equal what the status page of the providers shows. Upload was even faster than 6Mbit usually between 6Mbit and 7Mbit. Sadly the common Internet speed test portals are showing different values or won’t work. I assume that this is cause with from the high latency with an average value of 700 ms.
To get the actual real speed a fast debain mirror was picked and downloading all DVD images at a time and on the left uploading a BackTrack 5 image to a webserver which has 100Mbit connection to the Internet. Looking than at the 2.54% usage of of the NIC it should be clear that it’s nearly the speed they promised.
I’ll evaluate this option for a month. They promised, different from all other bi-direction satellite providers, no fair use policy no traffic limits nor port restrictions or traffic sharping. Here is a ton of data which would like to get on the offside backup servers as well as a ton of data which would like to be backuped from the offside servers. This could give a good average bandwidth and connectivity graph after 30 days. Than I’ll defiantly report who it worked and if this connection will be kept.
So far I’m impress of the connectivity clear sky or a thunderstorm are about 80ms difference in latency and about 5 to 10% in bandwidth.
MAFRI