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Fast intercontinental Remote Desktop Sessions

Saloom

1/26/23, 5:14 PM

I will be working from Thailand for the next months and I want to be able to RDP or Anydesk my office PC in Greece. Previous attempts have been proven unstable with varied results throughout the day - from flawless, to terrible connections. I am reading that ping time is the most crucial element in such connections. I have tried subscribing to a VPN service but the results are at best the same as not using VPN at all.

I am interested to find out if there is tried and tested way to approach this issue. I am not aware on how intercontinental routing is performed and if one can direct packets through an optimal route. I think this is outside the end-user's control but I would be interested to know if there are companies and subscription options that accomplish intercontinental routes with low latency.

3006

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networking

rdp

Jayan

1/27/23, 3:42 AM

Do you have different ISPs in local area? Sometime switching ISP get a new route that could help.

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anx

1/28/23, 9:37 AM

Have you tested the two location<>IXP connection pairs with whatever procedure the respective regulatory agency recommends? The way your question reads right now, the "intercontinental" part could well be irrelevant.

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Mihail Malostanidis

1/28/23, 11:21 AM

How are you reaching your computer with RDP? Does it have a public IP or is otherwise routable from the internet? Or are you already on some kind of VPN to begin with?

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Saloom

1/29/23, 11:37 AM

@MihailMalostanidis No, there is no public IP. I am connected through OpenVPN with our premises but I suppose this is the same as if I was connecting through a public IP.

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Mihail Malostanidis

1/29/23, 7:19 PM

@Saloom it's far from the same, packet loss and high latency are somewhat worked around with UDP mode, and you are probably not getting those benefits. Note that I am not suggesting you expose your computer to the open internet since you weren't doing this previously. Have you tried TeamViewer? Out of third party solutions it has always given me significantly better responsiveness. There's also https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk *if* you're prepared to trust it.

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Saloom

1/30/23, 8:09 AM

@MihailMalostanidis Yes I am using Anydesk quite a lot and I have noticed it is slightly faster than RDP under my setup, although if I have the option, I prefer RDP since the overall user experience is better IMHO.

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bjoster

2/26/23, 9:29 AM

I would look at `tracert` and/or `pathping` and check if I could do anything about the RTT or if it's "outside". If that's so, you can't do anything about it.

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Zac67

1/27/23, 2:18 AM

Previous attempts have been proven unstable with varied results throughout the day - from flawless, to terrible connections.

You do need a reliable Internet connection, with no or very low packet loss. Less than 0.1% is OK, less than 1% should be still usable, more than 1% is terrible.

ping time is the most crucial element in such connections

No, a low packet loss ratio is the most crucial parameter. Round-trip time (RTT/latency) as measured by ping is the second most crucial parameter. [edit] As Austin has accurately pointed out, a low variance in latency is also crucial when working with interactive user interfaces (RDP or similar).

I have tried subscribing to a VPN service

A VPN service cannot improve the packet loss ratio and definitely increases RTT. That won't help.

[edit] As @Bob has correctly pointed out, there are fringe cases where VPN might help: when your access ISP connection is actually good, but packet loss and latency deteriorate between your ISP and the destination network. A VPN connection might allow you to get around that problem, when the tunnel takes another route between your access ISP and the VPN provider that doesn't hurt connectivity (as much).

However, I wouldn't put much effort into this approach as it's not very likely to find a suitable VPN provider without in-depth knowledge (or research) of the access ISP's and VPN provider's connectivities.

find out if there is tried and tested way to approach this issue

The only thing you can do is find a better Internet uplink, in respect of packet loss ratio and RTT. The latter is subject to physical limitations (speed of light mostly), so it'll increase with growing distance (10 ms per 1000 km can be considered very good).

I am not aware on how intercontinental routing is performed and if one can direct packets through an optimal route.

That is nothing you can control, aside from choosing your Internet provider.

If connection quality regularly changes over the course of a day, you might need to adjust your working hours to that, if possible.

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Bob

1/27/23, 3:50 AM

A VPN actually can improve both packet loss and RTT, in some situations. Some ISPs have poor international routing but can be good locally. This can be sidestepped by connecting via a local VPN endpoint to so international routing is via the VPN's gateway rather than the ISP. Of course, this won't help if you're suffering packet loss issues locally.

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Zac67

1/27/23, 5:57 AM

@Bob That's possible, agreed - but not very likely.

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Austin Hemmelgarn

1/27/23, 12:03 PM

Possibly of note, if the RTT is consistently less than about 500ms, then it’s much more important that the _variance_ in RTT is low than that the _peak_ RTT is low. The human brain can compensate for a few hundred ms of latency just based on a bit of practice, but the latency needs to be consistent for that to be possible.

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jaskij

1/27/23, 5:01 PM

I'd contest that for RTT, the limitation is not the speed of light (Earth circumference at that speed is around 130ms), but rather the number of hops - each router, each switch, each media conversion, they all add their own latency.

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Zac67

1/27/23, 5:53 PM

@JanDorniak I was hinting at the *physical* lower limit of RTT over distance (depending on the speed of light in silica, appr. *distance / 200,000 km/s * 2*). Of course, additonal delays at intermediate hops come on top of that, so that effectively half that speed (or twice the latency) is actually realistic.

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joeqwerty

1/26/23, 5:27 PM

Are there other ISP's that you can use? Are they any better than your current ISP?

At the end of the day, no matter what you might try, your connection is dependent upon the network ISP/provider/carrier that you're using. VPN's and other mechanisms can't avoid traversing your ISP. You're just adding additional network overhead.

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Greg Askew

1/26/23, 6:08 PM

With that latency? No. It will be a miserable user experience with lags and disconnects. I've supported remote desktop environments with similar latency and even with the better providers and clean links, it's miserable. There are some tweaks such as disabling audio but no magic bullet.

https://www.consoleconnect.com/locations/athens/

Athens <-> Bangkok 343 ms

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Saloom

1/26/23, 7:23 PM

I get a constant 235ms from Athens, pinging DNS Servers in BKK right now. When I was in BKK last year, I had a quite decent experience in the early mornings. In the afternoon, it was becoming much worse. I am not sure what was causing this, but I would be happy if I could maintain this early morning experience.

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Greg Askew

1/26/23, 7:27 PM

@Saloom: that could mean that somewhere there are links that are oversubscribed/overcapacity. There's a huge difference in providers too. Verizon has excellent SLA's between the US and nearly the entire world. Between other countries not so much.

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Rainmaker

1/27/23, 2:37 PM

For direct RDP, you may want to look at some sort of jump host in Azure or AWS. These companies have relatively reliable low-latency networks between datacenters. So, you RDP to a host in SE Asia region, which RDPs to a host in France, which RDPs to your host at home. While the RTT of such a connection is still big (about 300ms), it is probably better then going peer-to-peer. Limit the RDP "experience" to save bandwidth. You probably don't need transparency effects or desktop backgrounds.

A different option, which might work quite well, is to use a conferencing app, i.e. Zoom, Teams, Teamviewer etc. These apps generally employ different protocols, sacrificing image quality for lower latency.

You would need both though. The RDP to join the Teams meeting and to approve remote control.

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Saloom

1/27/23, 3:51 PM

@ Rainmaker Initially I thought of using AWS to somehow route traffic through their network but I never thought of doing it through daisy chaining RDPs. There is also the overhead produced by each session, transcribing packets to image to packets. A packet proxy might be more sufficient. I think it is an overkill but I will try that just for the fun of it and see how it goes. Is there a way to assign EC2 instances from different regions to the same VPC and connect the RDPs without using their public IPs?

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