As we all get excited for the start of that soccer thing over in Germany, some IT pundits are worried that massive viewing of World Cup streams (thank you BBC!) will cause widespread network problems. Funny how most of the warnings are coming from IT network equipment vendors. The BBC can source only so much bandwidth and if a corporate network hasn’t already been setup to handle online video streaming, then they’re probably going to have problems with YouTube, Google, and other *ahem* sources – not the WorldCup streams. A number of the comments at a recent Slashdot thread that incorrectly inferred that the streams might slow down The Internet were right on including this one:

if porn doesn’t choke the Internet, no sport ever will!

Ya think?

But all the same, if you work at a small company with a small network uplink and a clueless IT person, you probably won’t be able to do much during game time. Of course if you ARE the IT person – great time to beg for more bandwidth. "Gee boss I’m not sure WHY things are slowing down at 2PM every afternoon in June – I think our corporate productivity just shot up and we need to boost the network capacity to handle it!"