AVVID over VPN

[MATT HILL]

Hi,

we are considering a VPN for our Global WAN in a large manufacturing company. Head office is in Japan, and our branch is in Australia.

We would like to run voice/video over the network but I am concerned about latency issues involved with the VPN.

Has anyone else had any problems with establishing voice/video over a VPN? Especially over such a vast distance? What sort of internet bandwidth should we dedicate to the VPN at either end?

Thanks,

Matt

[mmellet]

Generally, for reliability and Service Quality issues it’s not a good idea to attempt this over a shared/uncontrolled network like the Internet. It would be okay if Service Level Agreements are not an issue but in most business environments, it’s not acceptable. A private leased line is still a better way to go and you can VPN over that if you don’t trust the “cloud.”

[daveorenstein]

During the last summer Olympics we used a VPN to send large audio files from Sydney to Washington. In our application latency ws nor really a concern, however it was fairly minimal. Bandwidth turned out to be a greater issue as we were misinformed about the volume of data that was going to be passed. An overly simplistic rule of thumb would be "whatever resources an application needs for a local connection, it will need at least that much over a remote connection. Of course you still want to compare the ost of a VPN against a dedicated pipe. I hope that helps a little.

Dave

[ahojmark]

I'm running voice (CallManager IP telephony) from my home over a VPN connection and two different service providers to my company main site. It works fine.

A couple of colleagues used SoftPhone over VPN on an Ethernet-based Internet connection in their hotel when they last visited the US. So that's over the Atlantic to Denmark. And that also worked fine.

Of course, as long as you're using different service providers, there are no guaranties. If you’re planning on using this for anything but casual communications, QoS will be an issue.

-A