I used to work for a company that deployed satellite connections to mobile vehicles, who used a variety of services such as RDP, Logmein, VPN over satellite.

Latency should be more like 550-650ms, 800ms indicates a contented link.

It's useable for RDP, it is a little laggy but not insurmountable.

Logmein works a bit better.

VPN is fine as long as it's SSL not IPSec, as the sat modem will do TCP Ack acceleration which won't work for IPSec.

You can simulate it with this tool:

https://jagt.github.io/clumsy/

Add yourself ~300ms of latency in each direction, you will then see pings in the satellite sort of range. RDP to something and see how you feel it is.

Sat should be slightly better than this simulation as there is nothing doing TCP Acks.

In reply to a post by SLAMDUNC:

that remote desktop over satellite is still just impossible?

Only possible solution is using a Citrix product (e.g. XenApp) with its local echo feature enabled. (Speed Screen). This is where the Citrix client responds to your screen quickly - faking the response.

Doesn't work for all applications.

In reply to a post by SLAMDUNC:

Well I foud something official - the BDUK satellite trial page
http://www.primetech.co.uk/bduk-satellite-broadband-...
has (slightly optmistic?) information about useability.

Lol, that inspires confidence. Someone should explain to them the difference between Gb and GB.

I mean 10GB allowance is pretty paltry for £33 pcm but 10Gb is derisory

In reply to a post by brandscill:

I wouldn't try it. Working on servers over in Australia and Singapore with a ping of 1000ms is just a non starter, satellite is similar.

Yikes; I'd be asking some serious questions of the ISP if round trip to Singapore and Australia is a second.

carl@HP-Microserver:~$ ping www.telstra.com.au
PING www.telstra.com.au (58.162.89.137) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 58.162.89.137: icmp_seq=1 ttl=239 time=325 ms
64 bytes from 58.162.89.137: icmp_seq=2 ttl=240 time=328 ms
64 bytes from 58.162.89.137: icmp_seq=3 ttl=240 time=327 ms
64 bytes from 58.162.89.137: icmp_seq=4 ttl=239 time=328 ms
64 bytes from 58.162.89.137: icmp_seq=5 ttl=240 time=327 ms
^C
--- www.telstra.com.au ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 5765ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 325.170/327.286/328.798/1.220 ms

carl@HP-Microserver:~$ ping www.singtel.com.sg
PING www.wip.singtel.com.sg (203.126.100.199) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 203.126.100.199: icmp_seq=1 ttl=235 time=280 ms
64 bytes from 203.126.100.199: icmp_seq=2 ttl=235 time=275 ms
64 bytes from 203.126.100.199: icmp_seq=3 ttl=235 time=275 ms
64 bytes from 203.126.100.199: icmp_seq=4 ttl=235 time=288 ms
64 bytes from 203.126.100.199: icmp_seq=5 ttl=235 time=288 ms
^C
--- www.wip.singtel.com.sg ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4005ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 275.014/281.401/288.495/5.886 ms