Hi, we have a Vigor2950 and use VPN for 5 remote workers. Our head office is in Glasgow and the remote workers are spread out accross the UK (down to the south coast of England)

We never had problems until we moved to a new office a few months back, but now remote users are finding it very difficult to work. When they connect to the VPN I can see the connection instantly in the 'Connection Management' section of the router interface, however it can then take them up to 2 hours to connect to their email and access shares on the server.

The problem seems to get worse the further away the user is from the office. e.g. remote user in Scotland who works 30 miles away from the office may take 15 minutes to get connected. User in Manchester takes about an hour and user on the south coast takes 2 hours. None of their hardware / software has changed.

As an experiment I took two of the English users over to a McDonalds (free wi-fi) accross the road from our office when they were up. They both connected to email and shares instantly. Same users tried the same thing that evening when they got home and again it was taking them 1-2 hours to get connected.

We have a bonded broadband solution in the new office and upload speed is about 1MB. I've asked the broadband provider to test the line and they say it is OK. They also suggested that since the connection is instant from accross the street that this proves line speed is not an issue.

I'm now assuming it must be some configuration change since we moved. Any ideas what the problem could be?

Thanks

As an experiment, it would be interesting to enable ping/icmp on your wan interface. Then you could get all users to perform pings and trace routes from them respected locations.

In fact I'd go a little further and write a small dos batch file, to run a series of ping, traceroute, extended ping tests of various payload sizes to your wan interface and then collate and compare the results. This should help you / your ISP determine if there is a route/routing issue within the cloud to your wan interface/s dependant upon how your bonded broadband connection is physically presented to your router - I'm assuming it's via a single connection otherwise you would have more likely said you were load balancing as apposed to a bonded service?

If your bonded broadband presentation is via a single connection then the above tests are valid and hopefully you may well see some drops if the bonding circuit in the exchange / ISP cloud has any issues or routing/dynamic rerouting issues.

Also, ask that friendly McDonalds outlet - who provides their wifi cloud and who is they backhall ISP - it's possible the backhall connection ISP is the same as yours, in which case your laptop users data never leaves the local exchange if you see what I mean?

Did you have a bonded broadband solution in your original office?

I can think of many ways forward here, it's just a pity your ISP isn't being very proactive in helping their customer!

Thanks for the advice. I'm gathering the info now from our remote users. Thanks.

I have some info back from the users. Ping test are coming back with an average of about 100ms

Trace routes getting here in 7 hops (case 1) and 13 hops (case 2) nothing unusual looking. They are also showing as connected instantly, the problem seems to be the time in between connecting and being able to access anything on the server.