Satellites are used in many parts of the world where land lines are not available, too expensive, or unable to deliver the required bandwidth. While it’s possible to get significant bandwidth from a satellite-based link at a significant cost, they suffer from extremely high latency due to the distance from earth to the satellite and back.

Typical round trip times (RTT) for a cross-country or trans-oceanic land-based WAN link are typically in the range of 100 to 200 ms, while a satellite link can easily range up to a full second. This huge RTT causes massive delays, especially with application protocols like CIFS, MAPI, and TCP itself.

Unlike satellite-specific optimization products, which improve the behavior of TCP, Steelhead appliances tackle all three factors affecting any WAN (including satellite based links): limited bandwidth, TCP behavior, and application-protocol behavior.

If your company relies on satellite links to deliver data, Steelhead appliances could make a huge difference in your current application performance, as well as which applications you try to run over those links. Many companies are unable to roll out Exchange or Windows file sharing to satellite-linked sites because of the extremely high latency. With Steelhead appliances, those sites can enjoy performance similar to local offices connected through the LAN.