Shining Arcanine wrote:Contingency wrote:Shining Arcanine wrote:If you have a server here in the US, you could probably do a VPN with it and compress all traffic running through the VPN. It would hurt your latencies, but it would increase throughput.
Bottlenecks are wireless connection and satellite ISP. Unless that VPN includes a fiber run from the states, it won't improve performance.
It seems like we are talking about two different things. What do you consider a VPN to be? I consider it to be a Virtual Private Network which is a virtual cable an existing network connection that joins one computer to a network in some other place. That connection can be encrypted, compressed, etcetera. The compression aspect of it seems to be what would suit the original poster best here, in that he could make his throughput speeds higher.
He could probably get a cheap Linux VPS and configure it to act as a VPN server; the cheapest rate I can find is $25 per month, but there might be cheaper places if he shops around:
http://www.asmallorange.com/hosting/vps/Edit: I just noticed that the principle issue is the signal strength, rather than the bandwidth. If that is the case, then there is no need for a VPN setup. If the bandwidth is too low after the signal strength issues are fixed, a VPN setup would probably help with that.
Those are compelling reasons to use a VPN, but I believe the performance benefit is overstated. Why?
Compression:
Ever stick a jpg in a zip file? If you did, odds are the compressed file wasn't much smaller than the original. This is because there are limits to how much information can be compressed without losing integrity (otherwise we'd just keep going until it's a bit), and many multimedia standards incorporate compression into their format. This means that the type of traffic most in need of resource reduction is unable to take advantage of it. Encrypted data (everything SSL) is off the table as well.
Transit Path:
The guy is using a satellite ISP. Being Afghanistan, his hub is probably in Europe/Asia Minor. Where do you put the VPN? If it's in North America, you lose the advantage of localization. Instead of a 800 ms link to Yahoo Europe, you end up with 1100 to the US. Even if you just happen to know a reputable hosting provider in Istanbul and somehow manage to get a server in a colo next door to the hub, you've only managed to get "not worse" performance. You mentioned latencies but ignored their effect on throughput. When dealing with intercontinental traffic, additional hops cannot be dismissed; tacking on a extra 300 ms RTT will certainly have noticeable effects beyond a single hit to page load time.
#182 TT: 13/DNVT, Precedence: Flash Override. Switch: Node Center. MSE forever.