Recommended Connection Speed for Remote Desktop

Question

I will be working remotely from India during my vacation there and am looking to get an internet setup there that will allow me to work from India when needed. However the internet connection speed in India arent that great. So i was wondering what connection speeds could I get away with.

I know they have 512kbps connection and up. But just wondering what I would need for a good connection.

Solution

For Remote Desktop, you can pretty much get away with Modem speeds; anything faster will just make your user experience that much more plesent. The real kicker is going to be latency, how long does it take for a packet to travel from your connection in India back to your home office. Anything longer than 500ms will introduce noticable lag in a Remote Desktop session, latency above 2000ms will be almost unusable (though high level of patients will help).

That said, any wired connection of moderate speed (512kbps should be fine) will be more than sufficient for Remote Desktop.

If you intend to stream any music or video (for fun or work) you may want to go up to a higher speed, but like I said, it all depends on what you want to do.

Comments

[James T Snell]

+1 beat me to it. As I like to say "Latency is the new bandwith". I'd personally want to be under 200ms, but meh.

[MaQleod]

200ms is still a little high. Your first hop should be 50-100ms, anything after that is unfortunately not in your control.

[Neerkoli]

If I disable audio in remote desktop settings will it affect my connection performance?