If you are a basketball fan, you have probably heard that the games will be shown online. There is probably the game bracket up in the break room. You may have your favorite teams picked to win it all. With all the excitement that comes this month, with your favorite sport championship tournament, here are a couple thing to keep in mind.

You may want to check your companies policy on Internet use, during this time, so no one gets in trouble. You need to remember that watching these games, or streaming other web content in the office, could bog down the Internet for others. This is why most companies have Internet policies.

We recently had a customer calll to complain that their Internet would slow down during the day, almost at the same time every day.  After a while of monitoring log files when this happened,, we were able to find someone was watching a streaming video on their lunch hour for a class they were taking.  We don't like to be the bad guy here, but this was affecting everyone else in the office. Their remote office was having a hard time getting anything done during this time period causing frustration for everyone.

What needs to be realized is,  your company pays for a certain amount of bandwidth (see my blog on IT Terms) and video streaming takes a huge chunk of it.  If you add up everyone getting email, remote systems access, downloading important files from client websites, before you know it your connection to the Web is bogged down to a crawl. You may not be able to keep a connection to a remote system long enough to get anything done.

If your company is going to allow you to stream web content, try to be considerate of others. If someone is complaining about being kicked out of their online software, or downloads are taking forever, you may want to shut the stream down for a little bit so everyone can enjoy the fun.

Although streaming web content can be a cause of slow Internet, it is not always the cause. If you continually have problems with slow downloads, consider sending us an email to review your Internet circuit. Give us a call at 1-800-672-4806 for any questions you may have.

Have a great weekend
-Bryan