Could Tiger Woods render networks impotent today?

Golfer to break silence, potentially crippling networks and third-party providers as world watches via live streaming.

As the world awaits Tiger Woods' press conference today, network managers might be worried about how well their networks will handle the load created by multiple end users streaming the much-anticipated event to their desktops, hogging bandwidth and crippling performance.

How to view streaming videos faster

Woods, who will be speaking this morning to a small, hand-picked group of press, will not be taking questions but will broadcast the event publicly – which many media outlets intend to offer via live streaming on their Web sites. Because the golf star is speaking for the first time since news broke in November of his involvement in a late-night car accident, potential marital discord and numerous extra-marital affairs, media experts expect a majority of sports and pop culture fans to log in and learn more about Woods' stint in sex rehab and potential return to professional golf. While golf experts speculate how much Woods will actually admit or reveal regarding his personal sex scandal, network performance management venders and Internet watchers say the mere promise of Woods breaking his silence could bring many corporate networks to their knees.

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As the world awaits Tiger Woods' press conference today, network managers might be worried about how well their networks will handle the load created by multiple end users streaming the much-anticipated event to their desktops, hogging bandwidth and crippling performance.

How to view streaming videos faster

Woods, who will be speaking this morning to a small, hand-picked group of press, will not be taking questions but will broadcast the event publicly – which many media outlets intend to offer via live streaming on their Web sites. Because the golf star is speaking for the first time since news broke in November of his involvement in a late-night car accident, potential marital discord and numerous extra-marital affairs, media experts expect a majority of sports and pop culture fans to log in and learn more about Woods' stint in sex rehab and potential return to professional golf. While golf experts speculate how much Woods will actually admit or reveal regarding his personal sex scandal, network performance management venders and Internet watchers say the mere promise of Woods breaking his silence could bring many corporate networks to their knees.

"Tiger Woods' press conference [tomorrow] will be huge. There is no doubt about it," says Shawn White, senior director, external operations at Keynote Systems, a mobile and Internet test and measurement company in San Mateo, Calif. "We are more connected with high-speed connections at home, at work and now on our mobile phones. I am sure a lot of people will be viewing [this news conference] at work or on their mobile phones. This will undoubtedly impact some office networks, local mobile data centers such as AT&T and Verizon, for instance, if a large, concentrated group of people stream it to their phone, and of course the news and streaming sites themselves."

While Keynote tracked network and Web site performance problems due to high-profile planned (President Barack Obama's inauguration) and unplanned events (the unexpected death of pop star Michael Jackson), the vendor noted that Internet performance was impacted as a whole as well.

"With the online streaming of Jackson's memorial service, while Keynote did not report any wide-scale outages, we did observe some streaming providers ran out of capacity where online viewers had to either wait or try a different site," White says. But the problem doesn't necessarily lie with the Internet providers. Because many sites rely on third-party ad content providers, downloading images can slow page loading times and cause seemingly slow performance for those trying to read articles, for instance. For that reason, Keynote doesn't expect a wide-scale Internet impact as a result of the Woods' press conference, but the vendor does anticipate that some companies and providers will experience slowdowns.

"I anticipate that some news and streaming sites may be impacted, but not necessarily because they didn't prepare themselves," White says. "Depending upon how a Web site is designed, some Web browsers will wait until all the images are loaded before displaying the full web page. The news article or homepage may download just fine but that one ad, coming from an overloaded server, can affect the total online experience of that visitor."