What is the minimum Internet connection speed I need to be able to VNC/RemoteDesktop effectively?

Question

Title says it all. I know latency and network-hops are a factor, yet hard to shop for.

I want to run VNC or NX or RemoteDesktop or whatever, and interact with a machine sitting in my office, doing 2-D office apps and web apps type stuff, no crazy 3D animation or movies. Ballpark, estimate, what home Internet connection do I need, to replicate the experience of making the same connection from, say, a machine on the same LAN?

1Mbps? 7Mbps? 12 Mbps?

Does DSL vs Cable matter, on the latency front? Is the choice of application (VNC or NX or RemoteDesktop) a major factor?

Answer 1

The bottleneck will be the upload speed at the office, or the download speed at your home.
I was using my home machine with 1MBit/s upload from work, at a ping around 10-20ms. Surfing the web, or running Office apps will not be fun with rdp. And according to my experience, rdp is the fastet way of the mentioned.
Example: Both office and your home have 16MBit download, 1MBit upload. -> Result is you have 1MBit for rdp. If your office has 4/4MBit, and your home still 16/1, you can use 4MBit.
If you have VMWare Workstation, you can test by simulating slow connections with packet loss.