Olympic Overload

Have you ever watched streaming media on the web? Rubbish isn’t it – well actually, it isn’t anymore! Take the BBC’s coverage of the Olympics, I just clicked on the link on their website to see how things were going and instead of a page of text it launched a good-sized window in the webpage in my browser and I was hooked. Okay we are not talking high definition 1080p but it was very watchable and I did, I had it running in the background for most of the day while I was working. So what? Well I was working from my home office as I do regularly, and my network traffic usually consists of email, VPN traffic to our server and web browsing prospects or online services. I use Vista and I have a beautiful (in the eye of the beholder!) little widget that shows me my network usage. On a normal day, it is averaging less than 1kbps – so not a lot! Whilst streaming the Olympics I was averaging 40kbps – 40x my normal traffic!

So what you might think the Internet is free. How wrong you are. Your ISP actually pays for carrying your traffic from you local telephone exchange to their own network, and then they pay for passing the traffic to and from the Internet. I was told that if an 8Mbps broadband line was running at 100% usage constantly it costs the ISP £1200!

So back to my original point, if your start driving you broadband usage up by the factor of 4000% as I did, to watch the Olympics something is going to give! One thing that can happen is traffic management – as a consumer I hate traffic management; it is my right to use my broadband as I want. As a businessperson, taking the Olympics example, I WANT traffic management, I want you to put streaming video to the bottom of the pile.

We only use business broadband and 3G ISPs as part of our managed services for exactly this reason, they prioritise business applications, they do not have consumer users and hence the network performance is predictable – if you want cost effective, predictable business services come and see us to www.activator-uk.com