March Madness = Bad Bandwidth

A few years ago, during the first week of March Madness, a couple of the CTG sales guys thought they were “the bomb.” They streamed the opening round games on their iPads while they were working.  ESPN even had a tab in the right top corner that read “BOSS TAB” where it would change the view back to some business website.  However, the excessive streaming took our Internet to a crawl until the smart guys from IT got the bandwidth alerts on the streaming and knocked the “super fans” off the network so that everyone else in the office could work.

The bottom line is March Madness is not going away soon, especially for the Final Four teams, but it is drastically impacting our country’s Internet network infrastructure.  During major live streaming events, service is spotty at best. Look at the recent Game of Thrones announcement failure, 50th Super Bowl, the 2016 GRAMMY Awards and the 2016 Wimbledon streaming disappointment.  It is said by Conviva, a streaming optimization organization, that today 15% to 30% of all Internet video streaming experience is below average and live streaming is the most impacted.

You would think most of the issue is from “lack of bandwidth” but this doesn’t seem to be the actual case.  The typical reason is configuration or equipment failure – basically 1 point of failure.  This was the case in both streaming of the 2016 GRAMMYs and the live streaming of Mars done by NASA.  The business side of this says that the cost of full equipment redundancy is too expensive to make it a “picture perfect streaming” experience versus the income generated from the viewers.

Video and streaming is only growing.  The good thing, from a commercial standpoint, is the streaming experience is much more controllable. It won’t break the bank to make sure you have a disaster plan in place if something goes wrong and could impact the user streaming experience.

For more information about how to monitor and measure your video services click below.
Download the Network Monitoring Overview

For more information about Corporate Technologies Group, Inc. click here: www.ctgusa.net