Work remotely across the Atlantic

[zoli79]

About half a year ago I moved back to Hungary. The office I worked at in Sacramento, CA wanted to keep working with me. The plan was to go with VPN. Unfortunately what works OK locally doesn't work across the pond.
Although I was their BIM manager in the last year, I am an architect, not an IT person, so I can't even phrase the exact issue. But I see that our IT people have no idea how to solve this. Actually they gave up, and I have been using remote desktop in the past 5 months and while I can make useful work with background cleaning in projects and managing, production work is almost impossible (grabbing a line and moving it).
Back to VPN: I can make connection, but the connection itself is so slow, that even downloading a project doesn't even happen.
Our office uses MAC-s, they mainly operate in one office, I am the only regular person working outside. Every now and then others join in from home a few miles away - with no serious issues.
IT says that the tradeoff between Europe and US makes the connection slow down extremely.

I dug into Graphisoft's Cloud option, but that won't work for several reasons.
I generally need access to their server files, not just the BIM server.

Are there others here who work in an office with people remoting from another continent? Preferably US-EU. Could someone recommend what to look into?

[Anonymous]

I feel your pain. Couple of things that need to be checked: Your internet bandwidth and your company internet bandwidth as well. Please provide info on both. Now in the mean time if you have more than 10 Mbps synchro you should use screen sharing to access their servers....from a Mac (ask them to provide you with an IP address...

[zoli79]

Thanks!
Theoretically my internet speed is 120 MBit/s / 10 MBit/s, but in reality of course it is somewhat slower. (Provider guarantees 15/2) In December we did some testing, this is the summary of results:
-My internet speeds are 40MB / 10MB.
-250ms ping between me and office in CA
-Speedtest to Sacramento servers are 20MB / 3MB
-Ping times are good until the EU to US handoff, which is when they go from 18ms to 200ms+.
-Once VPN is connected, speeds drop to 2MB / 1 MB
-Called Meraki support and they verified there is no limitations on the client VPN configuration
-There is only the Modem / Router in house.

GS recommended the direct IP address option, but our IT service said that it has security risks and are against it...