Customer sez VPN connection is too slow...
Hello, and thanks for any opinions and insight y'all may be able to provide...
We are working with a retail-type pager/cell phone place with two locations. Both Locations are hooked up to AT&T broadband. They are about three miles apart...
Location 1 is their main location which houses a small (4 or 5 workstation) network based on Win2000 server. The server itself is a 1400mhz tbird with 512MB RAM.
Location 2 is the expansion branch with one machine only. A chumpy emachine, but anyway...
So they have this software that keeps track of beeper activation and billing, etc. The database is on the server, and the client runs on the point-of-sale machines at their main location AND (the fun part) at location #2.
Location #2 has a VPN connection back to the server at location #1 which they manually connect to before using that software in order to process certain transactions.
Amazingly, this system actually works, but the guy is wondering if we can speed this thang up. I guess it is taking too long between entering the transaction and hearing back from the server, popping the drawer, etc...
BUT- he is saying like ten to twenty seconds... This seems reasonable to me for the cicumstances. I told him VPN connections have more overhead and whatnot due to the fact that you have to establish the tunnel and add more encryption to the packets, etc... but I said I would research it in the meantime.
I was thinking more bandwidth might be a solution... perhaps DSL with a guaranteed upstream? Or could there be another solution like a some kind of dedicated line from the phone company?
<h2>How do other businesses do this?</h2>
Thanks Team!