Share internet bandwidth from HQ to branch?

Joined
Aug 14, 2012
Messages
33
Hi everyone,

Like to check on this possibility.

Let's say I have this.

HQ - 50MB dedicated line
Branch - 10MB DSL line (not dedicated but go through few hops)

Now both HQ and Branch are connected via IPSec Site-to-Site VPN.

Could I allow Branch to take advantage of the HQ internet speed? Means instead of using the branch 10MB (which the 10MB is just a meant for communication to HQ), now branch can use 50MB internet speed (or probably 20 - 30MB).

Some people said can have WAN compressions and somehow ways to boost up the throughputs.

Is this even possible? Any open source solution which can do the above? Or the paid ones?

Any help? Thanks in advance.
 
No not possible. You are limited to the speed of the slowest link.
 
Imagine you have two straws, one wider than the other. That's pretty much it.
 
Imagine you have two straws, one wider than the other. That's pretty much it.

More like you have a little bitty straw, and your friend has a big fat one. You're not going to get anything that was sucked with his straw.
 
Ignore the straw analogy. If the data is compressible and the VPN is actually doing compression, you gain speed.
 
i see. but weird, there's this vendor claiming it's possible.

basically they are doing this:-

datacenter having super huge bandwidth - metro-e, dedicated lines (which they confident to secure really cheap than normal price - probably due to bulk buy, no idea how they did that)

then if i want to apply a dedicated 50MB line to my office but i don't want the hassles of the setup fees and tied down by service contract, i could sign up with them for 50MB dedicated line with no contract. Plus can pay monthly payment at much a lower costs. I mean it's really cheap though.

all i need to do is to put a client appliance box at my office (as router which connects directly to my 10MB line or behind router, doesn't matter). This box will connect to a server appliance box at their datacenter which connects to the actual 50MB bandwidth. They claimed since I am on a 10MB line (with hops), I will enjoy an extra speed of 20 - 30 MB. Plus they are confident with this:-

say i download now with 10MB (with hops) line 1GB file at 1.5MB/sec. After they plug the above, i could see 7 - 8MB/sec speed when download.

This makes me wonder, how the heck they do this? They are not using any caching too.

They said I could do the HQ and branch scenario above too.

Any idea what they use? I just want to be sure they are not conning me.
 
If there is compression (and uncompression) along the 10mbit line you could potentially see a performance increase, the 10mbit connection is probably not symmetrical however so you could see your upload filling up which will hamstring any downstream gains.
 
i see. but weird, there's this vendor claiming it's possible.

basically they are doing this:-

datacenter having super huge bandwidth - metro-e, dedicated lines (which they confident to secure really cheap than normal price - probably due to bulk buy, no idea how they did that)

then if i want to apply a dedicated 50MB line to my office but i don't want the hassles of the setup fees and tied down by service contract, i could sign up with them for 50MB dedicated line with no contract. Plus can pay monthly payment at much a lower costs. I mean it's really cheap though.

all i need to do is to put a client appliance box at my office (as router which connects directly to my 10MB line or behind router, doesn't matter). This box will connect to a server appliance box at their datacenter which connects to the actual 50MB bandwidth. They claimed since I am on a 10MB line (with hops), I will enjoy an extra speed of 20 - 30 MB. Plus they are confident with this:-

say i download now with 10MB (with hops) line 1GB file at 1.5MB/sec. After they plug the above, i could see 7 - 8MB/sec speed when download.

This makes me wonder, how the heck they do this? They are not using any caching too.

They said I could do the HQ and branch scenario above too.

Any idea what they use? I just want to be sure they are not conning me.

I am VERY skeptical of this. I call shens. Sure you can use compression but you won't see 5x the performance...
 
I doubt you will see ANY performance increase for a couple reasons:
A lot if internet content is already compressed. If you compress already loss-less compressed objects, you actually increase the size.
Many ISPs use compression for a slight performance increase- see compressing already compressed objects.
VPNs are compressed already. You may be able to vary the compression, but you'll need encryption co-processors or beefy main processors to avoid decryption/decompression performance penalties.
Any useable compression will deliver very modest, almost undetectable performance gains, if any. It is much more likely performance will suffer.
 
I'm not sure how they claim to be able to jam 30Mbit+ through a 10Mbit pipe, that raises all sorts of flags for me. I, too, call shenanigans. If you can get a demo I'd be interested to see exactly what it is they're doing :p
 
Which his a limit of 10mb, the total of the slowest link

I'm talking about the payload. Of course the line stays 10, but if you send compressible data, the net effect is that more than 10Mb of data can go through per second.

Any gain beyond maybe 1 or 2 Mbps is questionable, though. Totally depends on the data.
 
okay i will get the demo at my office. Then i will see whether this works. If it does, then it is a miracle :p
 
Please be aware that some applications (SAP) will see HUGE benefits from things like Steelhead others not much. In general basic web browsing falls into the later category. Please be aware of what type traffic the vendor is using for the demo. A better angle would be to get vendor to set up a 30 day eval on premise with your traffic.
 
Been there, done that. The best we were ever able to accomplish was just caching as much as we could at the remote sites, it made the internet 'seem' faster, because they were all using the same sites and watching the same youtube videos, but IMO the 'wan accelerators' are a huge waste of money unless they benefit your specific application, and surfing the web usually doesn't fall in to that category.
 
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