A speed test before and after connecting to the VPN will make easy work of figuring that out. Won’t fix anything, but it can narrow down the problem.
Though, at the moment, I think the most important thing is for Bosda is to compare speed tests on his wired desktop, his wireless laptop (where he likes it and closer to the router) as well as connecting the laptop to the router via ethernet.
This will tell him/us if he has a wireless vs wired issue or something else between the router and ISP.
Also, if the modem (and router if it’s all in one) is rented from AT&T, and it’s old, it might be worth taking it to the AT&T place and having them replace it. At least with Specturm, they’ll just hand you a new one, no questions asked.
Just to say that I have AT&T, and in my region at least they push people to upgrade their connections. They invited me to upgrade, it was free, I got a new router, and I got a discount for a year. But the speed test will show if that works.
When I was working I had a program on my work PC that emulated my Solaris machine. This was a while ago but it was slow, and I would have hated to run any type of graphics on it.
Does the desktop run this also? If so, it seems to run okay, so it would imply the problem is either with the wifi or the laptop configuration.
Does this proprietary software have to be run at work?
Not necessarily. Lots of VPNs bypass any traffic that isn’t meant for a target that’s managed by the VPN. So the speed test would show perfectly good speed, but the VPN itself could still be the issue.
I assume the suggestion for a long wire is so the OP can work in the location they are currently using the laptop. If the OP didn’t have a reason to bring it out of the office they presumably wouldn’t even have bothered with this question.
Is the program you need to run running locally on your machine? Or, are you running the program on a computer that’s in the office, then remotely connecting to that computer in order to run the software?
Moderator Note
Let’s keep things civil in GQ.
Colibri
When you say ‘bypass’, do you mean they don’t encrypt/decrypt the data or that they send that data out into the world through your own ISP?
Whatever the case, I didn’t know that. I’m kinda surprised. I can certainly see a reason for it, but if I’m logged into a VPN, I’m not sure I’d want it decided which data does and does not need to be secured/passed through it.
Certainly if you are using your own VPN app that you got for personal use; but if the VPN is your employer’s and is only meant for letting you run the employer’s software as if you were physically in the office, I could see the system use a different approach
That makes sense. I rarely use a VPN. I set one up with OpenVPN just for those times when I’m not at work and need to access something via my work computer (my family business, so there’s no restrictions or concerns of doing or accessing something I shouldn’t).
It was nice to have during Covid. I never needed it (for Covid reasons), but it was nice to know that if I found myself quarantined, I could still do things like run payroll from home instead of trying to walk someone else through it over the phone.
Yes, I concur with Babale. My work provided laptop uses a VPN where only work related traffic , that is traffic to specific servers, goes through it. Everything else goes straight to my ISP.
This. The site you’re using almost certainly has a sucky connection. We have to use a VPN for some work systems, and it’s like dialup (and no, that’s not an exaggeration–yes, we’re spoiled by modern broadband, but I’ve measured this, and it’s often < 10Kb/sec).
In the office.
The Boss won’t pay for a local copy.
I use a VPN, but that wasn’t what I was discussing.
Gotcha. Then it is very possible that the bottleneck in your speed is the VPN itself or the network in the office rather than anything you have control over at home, especially if you have no slowness issues when doing anything else.
I don’t understand.
OK.
I’ll try updating my firmware, & buying a cheap antenna.
Right now, the possibilities are:
- office network is slow
- VPN is slow
- your laptop’s wifi receiver is slow
- your router sending out wifi is slow
- your home internet is slow
You want to run tests to eliminate possibilities. So, if you plug an ethernet cord from the router to your laptop (not as a permanent fix just to troubleshoot) you will eliminate 3 and 4 as potential issues; if you’re blazing fast once you plug in the issue is either with your router or laptop, but if you’re still slow it’s possible the issue is 1, 2, or 5.
For 1 and 2, you could try to see if any of your coworkers are having the same issue?
Yup. Oh yes.
It can be done either way: you have two paths, and you can adjust the path priority. Early VPN’s often had trouble with that, and stuff leaked out around the VPN. Companies running VPNs for offsite really didn’t like that, and the problem was fixed as VPN installation and configuration got better. I wouldn’t say that problem has entirely disappeared, broadcast traffic in particular almost always leaks.
Better understanding and control also allows you to configure it some other way if that’s what you want. Now that there are many third-party services available, some of them specifically offer split traffic.
I’m going to go through a restate what you’ve provided in more technical terms but with brief explanation so that perhaps it is useful:
Situation: You are using remote desktop software to connect to a computer at your work, on this computer at your work graphically intensive, expensive proprietary software is being ran. We will call the computer at your work the host machine.
Problem: When connecting to host machine on your laptop via remote desktop software, the remote desktop session frequently freezes and disconnects.
Some quick clarification–the resource usage of the proprietary work software being ran on host machine does not impact the connection over remote desktop software.
What is causing this behavior?: It is almost certainly due to packet loss in your connection, that undermines the ability of the remote desktop software to maintain a valid remote desktop session. In computer networking, information comes to you in “packets”, think of them like a stream of envelopes coming into your door. Sometimes those envelopes get lost. In some computer networking applications, a few lost envelopes are fine, the software is smart enough to work around it. But as more and more envelopes come in missing, the software has trouble functioning correctly. The software in question is the remote desktop software, too many of those envelopes are coming up missing, causing it to “freeze” and eventually to disconnect.
Why does this happen? There can be a number of causes, but you should understand that remote desktop software is fundamentally not dissimilar from streaming video in a sense, you are connecting to a remote machine and it is sending data that on the other side, on your laptop it can reconstruct in the form of a remote desktop session, that will make it like you are logged into the host machine directly, even though you’re sitting at your laptop. You can run commands on the host machine, change operating system settings, things of that nature. You can launch applications installed on the host machine. However this can be data intensivein some scenarios. One of the biggest of such scenarios is when running a remote desktop session in high-resolution. Unfortunately I am not sure I can easily explain to you how to fix it if that is the issue, but with modern internet connections it’s more likely unless you have an extremely low speed connection (it shouldn’t be DSL or slower), that the resolution of the remote desktop session is not the reason for the packet loss.
Here is a list of things that can cause packet loss and how to rectify them:
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Poor WiFi antenna in Laptop - New laptop, or buy a standalone USB “dongle” antenna that may function better. This is an example not a product endorsement: Amazon.com
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Poor WiFi radio transmitting from the Router/WAP combo device (“aka the AT&T device in your home”) - Call AT&T, ask for replacement
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Poor performance in the actual “routing” that goes on in a router, sometimes caused by underpowered or faulty hardware, bad router firmware etc etc - Typically again, call AT&T, ask for replacement
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Bad performance in the lines in going into your router, this could mean coaxial or phone lines inside your home, or even lines out under the street that have issues - Typically again, call AT&T, ask for replacement
The only thing you are likely able to easily fix is the laptop’s WiFi receiver, by using a USB dongle w/antenna instead. Since you are using company provided hardware (ATT) for the router, and I assume you are on a U-Verse package, those are integrated router/WAPs and also usually pretty locked down, you only real option is to ask ATT for help. If you are on ATT DSL you need to get a different internet connection, you will have significant reliability issues using DSL for remote desktop connections.