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I work remotely from home for several hours each week. In the last few weeks, my remote desktop connection has been virtually unusable for productive development. Both my workplace and my home connection are through the same ISP (Shaw Cable).
Shaw has a "speed test" application that I ran, and here are the results.
Home machine without VPN connected:
6.8Mbps down, 409 kbps up, 166 ping
Home machine with VPN connected and no remote desktop connection open:
885kbps down, 254 kbps up, 163 ping
Home machine with both VPN and remote desktop connected:
426 kbps down, 73 kbps up, 1406 ping
I ran the app several times for each setup and the results were consistent. The VPN uses the remote network gateway, so the slowdown when connecting to the VPN is expected - but what's up with my connection when I open a remote desktop??
I've already emailed the helpdesk at my office so presumably they'll look into it soemtime this week. But my question is - is this something I can mitigate from home? Anything I can change on my router, my local machine, or my VPN properties that would stop this from happening? Why is my overall connection speed going to crap when I connect with RD?
I have no idea to fix it so I'll leave a comment instead of an answer. Could it be that both the vpn and the remote desktop is encrypting your traffic? You should be fine with only encryption on the vpn. – Nifle – 2009-10-11T22:35:01.920
@Nifle - RDP >= v6 does encryption.. and it appears you can't turn it off (though I may be wrong on that front) – warren – 2009-10-14T04:34:37.320