Employee misuse taking up a quarter of bandwidth

Streaming media and personal surfing can eat up corporate bandwidth

Personal web activity and streaming media are clogging enterprise web connections, according to Symantec subsidiary MessageLabs.

The company said that, in some cases, companies are losing up to a quarter of available bandwidth because of misuse by employees.

Dan Bleaken, senior malware analyst at Symantec Hosted Services, said in a blog post that the World Cup in particular highlighted the risk of bandwidth crunch from increased use of streaming media.

The company's Web Security Service filtering tool recorded an 8.3 per cent jump in policy-based blocks on streaming media over the course of the tournament.

Streaming requests peaked on 23 June, when staff logged in to view the England v Slovenia and USA v Algeria matches during working hours.

Bleaken estimated that a worker viewing a 90-minute football match through streaming HD video will pull as much as 2.1GB through an internet pipeline, resulting in a slow down in network traffic and bandwidth 'brown-outs'.

"Part of the problem is that the internet is designed to continue operating even if links are busy or damaged; indeed that's the whole point of it," he said.

"This means that you probably don't notice if your emails take longer to deliver, web pages take longer to load and internet phone and video conferences are lower quality."