Some technology analysts are making dire predictions of office network slowdowns and disruptions caused by interest in the tournament, which began today.
Networks will be more taxed this year than for any prior NCAA Division 1 basketball championship tournament primarily because of free video streams being offered by CBS Corp. of the 56 games in the first three tournament rounds. Those rounds last through March 25.
'Interest in March Madness is much higher than other sporting events, especially by office workers who have betting pools everywhere,' said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at Yankee Group Research Inc.
Network General Corp., a provider of network and application performance products in San Jose, predicted yesterday that as few as 10 workers watching streaming video on their office computers could cut network performance in half.
Fifteen workers watching 100Mbit/sec video streams would completely tap out a T1 line into an office or branch office, said Ken Boyd, CIO at Network General.
The performance on an overburdened network might then lengthen response time on an important business transaction by a factor of 10, he said. For example, a person running a calculation over a spreadsheet might normally expect a 1-second delay for a response; network traffic could lengthen that delay to 10 seconds, Boyd said. At worst, there might be no response, something that could be troublesome when finalizing a stock trade, for example, he said.
In addition, office workers might be leaving themselves vulnerable to more viruses by clicking on something advertised as a video feed that is really somebody spoofing a network to do something nefarious, Boyd said.
CBS said it plans to cap the number of people who can tap into its video streams to keep the quality high. But that wouldn't necessarily alleviate potential network congestion on the receiving end -- which depends on the size of an office network, analysts said.
The controlling technologies involved are the routers and network 'pipes' into offices, such as T1 lines, said Matthias Machowinski, an analyst at Infonetics Research in Woburn, Mass. Machowinski said there are many ways to regulate such traffic, including Web site technologies that companies may already be using to block pornography or other objectionable material.
Network General and other companies sell monitoring products that can tell which workers are viewing certain kinds of software. And an entire retinue of smaller start-ups has developed software that sets priorities on certain traffic streams, opening network gates for all e-mail, for example, so that if a network is congested, lower-priority traffic such as video is delayed, he said.
Many major networking providers also offer caching technology that an IT shop could use to catch video streams for later transmission. But those tools are rarely used, except by the biggest companies, Machowinski said.
The best approach for many companies may be to set a policy detailing what kinds of traffic is appropriate during a workday, he added. 'Every company should have a policy around Internet usage,' Kerravala said. 'If people don't understand the impact of watching video streams and then do so, they'll blame the technology when it doesn't work.'
The irony of streaming video is that as more workers in an office watch a game online, the quality of the video will drop, Machowinski said. 'I'm sure the IT guys are the ones who will make sure they get the basketball video stream,' he said. 'Just joking.'