>Christian,
>
>Why does the dongle ping via the US? If you can't reconfigure that, consider swapping it for an ordinary wireless dongle accessing via your own router as Al suggested. If the issue is that it's a 3G dongle so your people can roam free, I'd give the vendor a chance but warn them performance isn't acceptable if data is traversing the ocean for no purpose. If they're the only option, then you've hit one of the reasons why mobile apps need to be able to cache locally: because even if you're in New York cell data still isn't all that reliable when you're on the hoof. If it's in VFP, I'd check out Lianja as one way to make best use of your existing code investment... after making absolutely sure the international ping really cannot be eliminated.
It's a relatively new service provider who does not have any own infrastructure and uses their main server on another island I think. Our client already is talking to them, but their main focus is normal household users who use their network for internet browsing, and not data intensive applications. So I would not be surprised if they just would not care. Good thing is that this situation forced me to rethink the data transfer strategy and I have found a way to cache the data on a temporary table and batch process the data in a separate process. This can be handled pretty good even in VFP so far.
Christian Isberner
Software Consultant