Fixed and Mobile Satellite Internet Service

Satellites maintain their orbit just a little more than 23,000 miles above the earth. Even at speeds approaching the speed of light, there is a delay (measured in milliseconds) as data travels up to the satellite and back down to earth. These unavoidable end-to-end propagation delays range anywhere between 550ms-650ms for the iDirect based Mobilsat Enterprise ISP network, and 700ms-900ms for the HughesNet network.

These delays present a special technical challenge to satellite users who need to secure their data with a Virtual Private Network (VPN).While these delays do not affect web surfing or email performance, VPN applications that were not specifically designed for satellite networks will still work. Most "off-the-shelf" VPN applications such as Nortel, Cisco, Checkpoint, Netscreen, etc. typically do not perform very well over HughesNet due to the higher inherent latency.

Using an IPSEC VPN application over HughesNet will cause a 40%-75% reduction of the throughput of the connection. The higher the latency is, the more impact you will see in overall network performance when using an IPsec VPN. Mobil Satellite Technologies offers two solutions to overcome latency problems when using VPN over higher latency satellite networks.