Dear Lord, give me bandwidth

Why did the chicken cross the road? Because they had broadband available on the other side. I've been working on setting up our newest branch. Our current approach is DSL and a VPN router to connect to our main site. The DSL provider told me 3 weeks was normal install time--but then most of the eastern seaboard lost power. Whether it's true or not I don't know, but our install date has been bumped because of the power outage. And we needed to go live Sept. 2.

I've been working on a failover plan for our other branches involving a Snapgear router. Most Snapgears support both broadband and dialup (using an external modem). The goal was to get a Snapgear to our remote sites, and have them configured to dial up to the internet if the DSL connection went down. I'd done some testing. Then Sept. 2 rolled around, and it got thrown right into prime time. And what a spectacular failure it was.

Part of it was the fact that we took a bunch of guys who are used to the 100mb connection in their offices, and put them out remotely for a day. It's amazing how quickly you can fill up a 44kbs pipe. But even with one person connected, I still had problems. Telnet sessions (which we depend on) dropped sporatically. Most network resources were fine, but those stateful connections got to be a real pain.

The wierd part is that I remember using Telnet back in college over 9600kbs dialup on static-y dorm room phone lines. It always seemed pretty forgiving. But it wasn't yesterday. I'm still not sure if it's the additional overhead that the IPSEC tunnel adds to the mix, or if it's just plain line speed. But we were sitting around yesterday trying to figure out a way to get a long range wireless connection to work through a hill and a number of highways.

Thankfully I spoke with our DSL "engineer" this morning, and while he doesn't have any specific dates yet, he feels it should be very soon, and he's working for us to try to get the install moved up in the priority list. Until that's in, I'm laying low trying to avoid the bullets aimed in my direction...