Downlink speeds of high-end BGAN terminals are up to 492 kbit/s and upload speeds are also up to 492 kbit/s - Best Effort as BGAN Background IP (BIP) is a contended (shared) channel. As with all geosynchronous satellite connections, latency is an issue. Common latency is 1–1.5 seconds round trip for the Background IP service. It is slightly better for the Streaming services at 800 ms – 1 second. This latency is mainly due to the great distance that has to be traveled before a packet can reach the Internet, but is slightly exacerbated by the back-end technology as normal latency over a Very small aperture terminal (VSAT) system is roughly 550 ms. BGAN users frequently use PEP software or other TCP packet accelerators to improve performance, and the BGAN user is often assigned a non-routable IP address and routed through a NAT server; this increases security and helps control usage costs.