Are the Olympics slowing you down? What about ESPN, Pandora and YouTube?

by Team AppNeta on August 02, 2012

By: Jim Melvin

Everyone love’s the Olympics and it is easy to see why — the Olympics truly have something for everyone.  From cycling, to soccer, to archery, and basketball; the breadth of sports (36 in all) covers just about every sport that you could want (except for lacrosse, one of my personal favorites).

What we are seeing, though, is the time difference in London coupled with NBC’s Live converge strategy (essentially no live coverage in traditional media) means that if you want to catch the Olympics live, you need to go to one of your least favorite bars to watch it…your office!

That’s right, if you want to catch the Olympics live, just settle into your desk at work, make sure that not too many people are watching (or not), and stream away.  There are a number of ways to get to the content, and heck the bandwidth is free and infinite, right?!

No, not at all.  Streaming live Olympics coverage, ESPN.com, or any other bandwidth-dependent media into your office creates an enormous strain on your organization’s network and application performance. As noted in today’s CNBC coverage on this topic, this is turning into one of the biggest challenges of the summer for large enterprise companies: keeping corporate applications running while everyone is streaming the Olympics!

As the article points out, “Companies, such as General Electric’s  GE Aviation, Cintas, Kraft Foods subsidiary Cadbury, and Major League Baseball, have also blocked or limited access to bandwidth-sucking sites. The bandwidth constraint faced by Corporate America is unfolding nationwide at an unprecedented rate as websites and apps are embedding larger files and more employees bring their own devices — phones and tablets — to work.”

Think that streaming media doesn’t add up to much?  Think again. In the PathView Cloud screen shot below you can see how one of our customer sites experienced a massive ramp in YouTube traffic going from less than 1 Mbps before 8:00am to more than 15 Mbps by 8:25am.  What does that mean?  For many companies or remote offices, 15 Mbps would 3 – 5 times the available bandwidth.  This could have significant impact on any other critical corporate application like hosted apps for CRM, collaboration, finance,  or even VoIP and videoconferencing.

So if you want to watch the Olympics, have fun.  However, if you want to make sure that your corporate applications keep on running, check us out at

PathView Cloud.

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