ISPs Struggling to cope with Bandwith during World Cup Games

[MendMyComputer]

Hi everyone,
we're based in the UK and have had numerous people call us during world cup match time with extremely poor internet connection speeds.

These have been lines that normally run at about 8Mb/s running during match time at 0.3Mb/s

I would like to know if anyone else in the UK or Worldwide is suffering the same symptons which i assume is down to mass streaming of the 2010 world cup games.

In the UK BBC seem to be sending all there match streams over the internet on port 80 making them virtually impossible for Admins to block.

[kpac]

Do you know who exactly is doing the streaming?

[MendMyComputer]

The streaming issue is not with us internally but seemingly the ISPs excuse for the lack of internet speeds.

The comment about streaming is more generalised to all the people at the workplace streaming media from the BBc and ITV.

There are numerous threads elswhere on the issue like this.

But save from outright blocking all BBC websites or Flash there seems to be no way of just blocking the streams

[kpac]

Can you block Flash on specific websites, namely BBC.co.uk and the ITV site?

[MendMyComputer]

From reading elsewhere it would seem that you can only block flash 100% everywhere not specific to certain sites/domains

[quaxo]

If these are residential people who connect directly to their ISPs, there's nothing you can do. This is an issue the ISP would have to resolve if it is indeed a matter of not enough bandwidth to go around because too many people are watching streams and sucking up bandwidth. It's not unheard of that an ISP have slowdowns during peak usage times.

If it's something more local, say like a company or school network, than they should block the websites that are streaming this content and bogging down their networks until the World Cup is over with. That, and fire some lazy employees who should be working and not watching football (soccer).

[MendMyComputer]

If these are residential people who connect directly to their ISPs, there's nothing you can do. This is an issue the ISP would have to resolve if it is indeed a matter of not enough bandwidth to go around because too many people are watching streams and sucking up bandwidth. It's not unheard of that an ISP have slowdowns during peak usage times.

If it's something more local, say like a company or school network, than they should block the websites that are streaming this content and bogging down their networks until the World Cup is over with. That, and fire some lazy employees who should be working and not watching football (soccer).

We have spoken to a couple of ISPs and we are being told that it's a bandwith issue as they are running at 95-100% capacity on their Nodes in the Wolverhampton Exchange (UK) and therefore there is nothing they intend on doing about it.

Just frustrates me that the BBC have failed to supply information to techies on how they can easily block their streaming content, after all companies that watch TV have to pay their license fees tooo...