BACKGROUND: The objective of this study was to perform a pre-clinical remote telesurgery trial of a da Vinci telesurgery prototype on a surgical-grade virtual private network. METHODS: A da Vinci telesurgery-enabled prototype was used to conduct surgical trials across a 17 MB/s bandwidth VPNe network spanning 2848 km round-trip landline distance from London, Ontario, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The outcomes measured during the trial were surgical times and quality of anastomoses. RESULTS: Network configuration resulted in observed latencies of 370 ms with 140 ms due to transport delay. The da Vinci telesurgery prototype performed well subjectively and average porcine pyeloplasty anastomotic times were 20.7 +/- 4.7 min. CONCLUSIONS: This work constitutes an early evaluation of the da Vinci telesurgery prototype for conceptually remote telesurgical operations. This study clearly demonstrated the feasibility of remote telesurgery using the da Vinci platform to perform a complex surgical task.