WAN compression

[ahjawad]

Hello,
We are providing internet on VSAT to a housing compound which is far from city with no telephone lines. Unfortunately VSAT per Mbps cost is around 3000 USD and we have around 70 Users fighting over it. I was reading a lot about bandwidth compression products, like cisco WAAS, riverbed and expand networks. Has any body tested any cheaper products other than above with good results. Please let me know if you come across bandwidth compression, wan acceleration products.
FYI we have squid running but does not help much.

Regards
Jawad

[skyhook]

Hello,
We are providing internet on VSAT to a housing compound which is far from city with no telephone lines. Unfortunately VSAT per Mbps cost is around 3000 USD and we have around 70 Users fighting over it. I was reading a lot about bandwidth compression products, like cisco WAAS, riverbed and expand networks. Has any body tested any cheaper products other than above with good results. Please let me know if you come across bandwidth compression, wan acceleration products.
FYI we have squid running but does not help much.

Regards
Jawad

If you want to use a kkind of compression, you need devices that support this compression on each node (for example: on your gateway and on a gateway in ISP end point...)

[ahjawad]

Hello Rob,
Have you used any devices like this?
OR do you recommend ay particular product.?

RGrds
jawad

[skyhook]

Hello Rob,
Have you used any devices like this?
OR do you recommend ay particular product.?

RGrds
jawad

Not particular product, but an example can be Mikrotik/RouterOS.
The very difficult, is to locate a device on ISP side...
Another idea is to find a ISP that support native compression.

[raytaylor]

My suggestion is routing via a vps.
The only stuff you can really compress is http web traffic.

You would need to place a transparent proxy between your users, and your vsat connection. You then set the transparent proxy to daisy chain to another proxy running on a rented vps server with a nice fast connection. Approx $50 usd a month.

On the VPS server, you can run the Rabbit proxy program: http://www.khelekore.org/rabbit/rabbit2/gettingstarted.shtml

Basically this will download the data in the web pages and as it does, it recompresses it. Eg. it will compress images as they come through the proxy system. So the images in web pages will reduce in size, with a minor quality decrease, but usually you can shave about 20-50% off the size of a jpg image being downloaded.

There is no client software or special configuration needed.
If you cannot set up a transparent proxy to pickup the clients requests, you can configure the clients web browsers to talk directly to the rabbit proxy program running on the vps server.

A transparent proxy is probably a good idea because you can run a rather large cache so that commonly accessed images and files are served from your cache rather than the websites. Most proxy caches will manage themselves automatically.

I would also recomend blocking P2P traffic during the day or charging on a per gb basis - which seems like it is coming to the US. In New Zealand we are used to plans with a 20gb cap being standard.