Stuck in Iraq, need help with slow Internet...
 

Hey everyone, I am in the US Army serving in Iraq right now. The whole place generally sucks, but the Internet just really tops it all off.. We are running on satellite Internet, and average about 10kbs on a good day. And about 4kbs upload... We pay for the service, and it runs over a PPPoE. I am wondering If I pay for a second line, and run dual lines, will that improve my speed? Or simply allow me to download more, but with the same speed? I remember wanting to do this back in the day on RH 5.2ish... Before the days of broadband. But I could not figure it out with dial up.. Do any of you have any suggestions? Or know it if would even be worth doing?

Usually, the problem with satellite internet is that while the bandwidth is ok (ok-ish) the latency is terrible, and to the casual observer that looks like terrible bandwidth. I'm not quite clear whether that is what you've got, or whether you have a poor (the technical term is probably cr*p) provider which manages to turn these underlying characteristics into poor bandwidth.

Ideally, you would try to get some information; what do your ping times look like, does dig show any sign of caching, does ftp work better for downloading data than http? How does your data flow look? Any sign of a 'picket fence' pattern is suggestive of latency/name serving problems.

If it does seem like lousy latency, probably you best first move would be to cache name look-ups (some people in remote locations for whom satellite is they only way they are going to get bandwidth find it is worthwhile running a name lookup over dial-up paired with a main data flow over satellite...that should show you how bad it can be, because you won't often find dial-up reccomended as a performance enhancing measure).

In an ideal world, your ISP would have a local cache of look-ups. You are probably very aware that this is not an ideal world, but it wouldn't do any harm to ask, just in case they have one and you are not set up to use it. Otherwise the DIY option isn't too bad, just remember you don't have to use BIND.

I think that its only after investigating the nameserving/latency stuff that you will find it worth investigating dual channel bonding, or whatever.

It is most predominantly a latency issue. I was the one who set up the satellite system when we first arrived here, we use an iDirect system, which is about as good as it gets for a satellite system with less than 100 users. I have been browsing through the forums for a while now, and I see that using two connections will not in fact "double" my speed, as I had assumed. Rather it would just give me the ability two download two files at 10kbs apiece, pretty much what I had expected, I think I may try it out. The only real question I have right now, is should I use a dual WAN router? or two NIC cards?