VPN to work from another continent?

Question

Has anyone tried to VPN to their work servers located in another continent? If so, how was the speed? I know wifi hotspots at cafes can be unreliable as local internet connections themselves, but what if I had my own home internet with reliable fast broadband? For instance, if I were located in South Korea with a very fast connection, and I wanted to connect to my VPN in Poland also with a fast connection, can I count on being able to reliably access work data (both gui and ssh/text) and at acceptable latency?

Answer 1

Yes, Inter-Continent VPN's are extremely common - its a prime way arround the great firewall of China, and businesses with multiple locations will often do the same.

There will usually be a performance hit with using a VPN - how severe will depend on a number of factors, but chiefly -

1. How much further the distance between you -> vpn -> dest is relative to you -> dest. As an example, if you are in America and want to access content in the US over a VPN set up to New Zealand your latency will increase from (say) 25ms to at least 240ms as the traffic needs to transverse the ocean twice. If you were trying to browse content in NZ the difference in latency would be negligeable, and of no real consequence to Australia either.

2. The bandwidth constraints - instead of being constrained only by the bandwidth between source and destination you have the bandwidth between all 3 points to consider.

With respect of a VPN between South Korea and Poland (and speaking without any specific knowledge of the Internet in Poland, but assuming it to be reasonable), you would find using a VPN should feel noticeably slower then a direct connection compared to if you were on the same continent (you don't say where you normally connect from), but it should be quite useable. No practical problem using SSH with latencies of up to about 240ms, its just not as smooth. For GUI it could be noticeably slower and probably uncomfortable- however this can be somewhat mitigated by ensuring you use compression across the link. The available throughput of the link is a big variable here.

As far as reliability goes, there is no reason that a VPN should be less reliable then a direct connection (in fact I can argue it should be more reliable) - unless you have to contend with something like the great firewall of China. I have not had much exposure to IPSEC, but OpenVPN is hands down more reliable then PPTP as well as more secure.