Top five tips for streaming World Cup matches to desktops

How best to deliver the World Cup to employee desktops

UK employees hoping for a miracle - decent real-time streaming of World Cup matches

There is just a week to go until the World Cup 2010 football championship kicks off with the opening match between hosts South Africa and Mexico.

ITV will be streaming the matches live, so what should corporate network managers who are prepared to let their staff watch football at their desks do to manage the demand for bandwidth?

Senior marketing evangelist Dave Schneider at IP testing company Ixia offers five tips for network managers to think about when the first match kicks off next Friday.

• If you haven’t done so already, implement router Quality of Service (QoS). This will allow you to deprioritise video traffic with respect to normal business VoIP and data. Dust off that Cisco router manual for the instructions
• Router QoS might not do the job. A more sophisticated load balancing device, like an application delivery controller, might be needed.
• Get out a calculator and do the maths. If the stream is XMbit/s and your internet connection is YMbit/s and you have you have 100 staff, your internet usage will 100 times X. If that is more than 70 per cent of Y, think again. Once your network usage reaches 70 per cent, you’re in trouble. Set up connections in conference rooms instead!
• Encourage people to use wired connections, and not wireless ones. Wi-Fi areas can easily become loaded, possibly breaking up at that 'goal' moment
• Check people's desktop PCs, do they need an upgrading?