* NCAA – a non-event for IT managers?
Most of us really have a great time when the weather service makes a mistake. As a kid I remember the weather man once admitting that we now had six inches of white and fluffy “partly cloudy” covering the ground.
The telecommunications world experienced a similar non-event a couple of weeks ago with the broadcast of the NCAA basketball tournament. We’ve talked about this a couple of times in the newsletter – last year we were amazed that the broadcast worked at all, and earlier this year we predicted that in 2007 video would become a major challenge for corporate networks.
With this as background and with the announcement from CBS that it is doubling its outbound capacity for this year, there was a good deal of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) concerning what impact this might have on corporate networks.
Steve was contacted by a business reporter for the newspaper in one of the cities with a chance to be the national champs. Her question was whether this was a major concern. His response? It could have a minor impact on inbound traffic, but that most corporate networks would – or at least should – have appropriate performance management tools so that this would be at most a blip on the radar screen.
He also pointed out that this is really more of a policy and social issue than a technical issue. For instance, most companies *should* have acceptable use policies for their networks. And then there’s the question of whether these policies are obeyed. (CBS and the NCAA did not help this by having a “Boss Button” on the interface that would immediately replace the game with a bogus spreadsheet.) Further, with the expansion of digital cable, all games would be available in most locales. So the simplest solution would be for people to watch television.
Not to nit-pick, but Steve’s quotes never saw the light of day. Rather, the reporter allegedly quoted one of our colleagues as saying, “Because the NCAA Tournament involves ever-popular college basketball, gambling and free online content, it’s ‘almost the perfect storm of issues for companies. You’ve got a highly motivated group of individuals with the means to watch it.’”
Hmmm… We’ll keep the identity of our colleague anonymous and hope he was misquoted. So far as we know, there were no major issues encountered. If you encountered problems, please let us know and we’ll share your experience.
But this does raise a serious question: How do you determine legitimate and illegitimate multimedia content on corporate nets? We’ll continue the discussion next time.
