Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of Brian Johnson
Brian JohnsonFlag for United States of America

asked on

Business Broadband for Small Office in Dubai

Hello Experts and thank you for taking the time read this.

I currently have a small office in Dubai located in the DIFC.  The office has three desktops and a printer connected to a Juniper SSG-5 VPN router.  The Juniper SSG-5 in Dubai has the VPN terminate in our London office. The router has an incoming ISP from DU, currently using 50Mbps/12Mbps business broadband professional service.  The desktops in the office are essentially being used as thin clients because they open IE to use Citrix XenDesktop to VM's located in London which is where their exchange, file shares, profiles, etc. reside.  The VM's are local to everything they need and the network is being used for the most part to pass Citrix ICA traffic back to their machines in Dubai.

Even so, the users complain of slowness.  There is latency after all, its Dubai to London and back.  So here are my bullet points:
  • Juniper SSG-5 VPN in Dubai, terminates in London
  • Juniper SSG-5 soon to be replaced by Cisco 800 Series VPN
  • Latency at 140ms
  • Incoming ISP at 50Mbps/12Mbps
  • Desktops are Windows 7 64-bit
  • Citrix XenDesktop Client 7.8
  • Citrix Receiver 4.3.100

Our first thought is to improve the network. DU offers several flavors to pick from
  • 50Mbps/12Mbps - 1499 AED/month - Current service
  • 100Mbps/25Mbps - 2,999 AED/month
  • Symmetrical 16Mbps 18,000 AED/month (they have some for less all the way up to 1Gbps for an astronomical cost)

A bigger pipe can't fix latency, so i'm not sure how much of a help that will be.  

Would the symmetric 16Mbps improve things to where the cost could be justified (I would have to present to management the justification)?  

I'm looking for any user experience with an office in the Middle East region connecting back to a main hub office, such as London or Singapore or Hong Kong, and what the experience has been through VPN?
  • What ISP do you use?
  • What's your connection speed?
  • How do your associates work?
  • What have your challenges been?
  • How did you overcome those challenges?

I'm trying to find out what we could be doing better to improve the user experience?
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Mark Galvin
Mark Galvin
Flag of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Avatar of Brian Johnson

ASKER

Thanks Mark, that is helpful to know that in the end, most of the performance between Dubai and London will be effected moreso by latency than the network bandwidth.  Appreciate hearing your experience.