Satellite Latency Problems

[hjenkins]

I have a FM Server on a 1meg SDSL LAN to which remote users on standard DSL connections happily use.

One of my remote users recently moved to North Wales where standard DSL is not accessible so I set up a satellite DSL service believing that this would be the solution for him to connect to the server via IP. I did this as I knew nothing about latency issues which now prove to be a major problem as the database takes 10 times longer to open than it did over ISDN.

Does anybody know of an affordable solution to this? I have spoken to a couple of companies who are developing software which improves the latency issues on a Mac by reducing the TCP/IP header compression but they are very expensive.

Can anybody help?

[Karl Kuehn]

The only solution is caching. I had the same problem with a customer out in the farmlands in Wisconsin for multiple email accounts, and the only way I got around it was to put in an email server to cache the traffic (with semi-insane wait times). You will have to figure out if replicating the FMP database is workable in your situation.

[BobWeaver]

Huw, does your remote user have the satellite modem connected directly to the Mac? When I checked last year, no one offered Satellite internet on a Mac.

I have a client that has his LAN routed through a PC that is on DirecPC satellite. At first, it was slower than their old 56k dial-up router. We managed to locate some caching software that solved the problem. Have a look at this topic:

http://www.fmforums.com/threads/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=43538&page=1&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=all&fpart=1

The software we found was from http://www.orbitsat.com/

It is PC software, not Mac. But, if the system is set up using a PC as the router, then this software should help.