04 Jun 2010
There is just a week to go until the World Cup 2010 football championship kicks off with the opening match between hosts South Africa and Mexico.
ITV will be streaming the matches live, so what should corporate network managers who are prepared to let their staff watch football at their desks do to manage the demand for bandwidth?
Senior marketing evangelist Dave Schneider at IP testing company Ixia offers five tips for network managers to think about when the first match kicks off next Friday.
• If you haven’t done so already, implement router Quality of Service (QoS).
This will allow you to deprioritise video traffic with respect to normal
business VoIP and data. Dust off that Cisco router manual for the instructions
• Router QoS might not do the job. A more sophisticated load balancing device,
like an application delivery controller, might be needed.
• Get out a calculator and do the maths. If the stream is XMbit/s and your
internet connection is YMbit/s and you have you have 100 staff, your internet
usage will 100 times X. If that is more than 70 per cent of Y, think again. Once
your network usage reaches 70 per cent, you’re in trouble. Set up connections in
conference rooms instead!
• Encourage people to use wired connections, and not wireless ones. Wi-Fi areas
can easily become loaded, possibly breaking up at that 'goal' moment
• Check people's desktop PCs, do they need an upgrading?
The 2010 World Cup will be the first in the history of the tournament where every game will be streamed online live, as well as being the first World Cup to offer high definition coverage of the tournament. In the UK, matters are further complicated by the majority of games taking place during normal office working hours.
The precedent for online streaming of major sporting events was set with the 2008 Olympic Games. US broadcaster NBC opted to concentrate its live coverage online due to time zone constraints. As a result, NBCOlympics.com served up more than 1.2 billion pages and 72 million video streams during the 2008 Summer Games, according to research group Nielsen Online, more than doubling the combined traffic to its site during the 2004 Summer Games in Athens and the 2006 Winter Games in Turin. Traffic to NBCOlympics.com peaked each day around noon as office workers checked in during the lunch hour.
With this in mind, according to a recent survey from IDC, the average organisation loses between 30% and 40% of its network bandwidth to non-work related online activities.
While service providers struggle to maintain adequate access for all their customers, organisations face multiple problems during these artificial demand peaks within the LAN such as constrained WAN connectivity and heightened security risks created by users venturing to untrusted and unknown sites in search of video content not available from official broadcast streams.
Posted by: Mike Silva, regional EMEA sales manager, Ipswitch Network Management Division 07 Jun 2010
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