As enterprise networks become more sensitive to the type of traffic that’s flowing, mission-critical applications such as voice and video have to be protected from things like surfing the Web. The way to do this is through classes of service. In this video, Mike Magri, Director of Industry Solutions for NetQoS/CA, walks us through how the NetQoS Performance Center can ensure the performance of voice and video so that recreational use of the network – such as Web surfing – doesn’t get in the way of your business applications.

A study by L.E.K. consulting, a business strategy and marketing consulting firm, recently conducted a survey on media consumption habits; and what they found turned out to be a bit of a shock. 

According to the survey, 32% of users listen to an average of 5.8 hours of Internet radio a week.  That’s huge.

The reason it is huge is because unlike a lot of high-throughput downloads; streaming radio tends to be a constant drain on bandwidth.  Sure, a 5GB file is a lot to transfer, but it saturates the available bandwidth in the pipe for a limited amount of time.  On the other hand, 160mbps streaming audio improperly configured into a high QoS priority knocks out 160mbps of your total bandwidth.  Multiply that stream by the number of users streaming; and you can see why a new interest in streaming Internet radio is something to take note of. 

The other major thing from the report worth mentioning is that “e-readers,” like the Kindle, have been encouraging people to consume more written words – digitally downloading them.  While only 10% of consumers own e-readers, 48% of those who do report reading more books, and only 7% decreased their book reading.  This also extended to magazines and newspapers as well. 

Why?  According to the survey, 40% said that e-books are more affordable, and that drives their consumption, while 47% indicated that “more interesting books were being released.”  Considering that the publishing industry hasn’t hit a halcyon boom, it’s more likely that e-books enable readers to more easily find books they would be interested in, through searching, recommendations, etc.    

What’s interesting about this shift is that we’re increasingly in a world where if the medium can be digital, the medium will be digital.  And this requires thinking about the network in ways that a lot of enterprises haven’t thought about the network before. 

It used to be that the network was what enabled computers to talk to each other – it still is, of course – but the language of computers was dull and uninspired; in the beginning, only business apps transmitted through the network, because the business apps were what the network was used for. 

But to most end users today, the network isn’t just for one limited purpose.  It’s not even for a variety of purposes.  The Internet is the tube which gives us information, entertainment, conversation, and sustenance, in the form of productivity.  It is, quite frankly, the most important thing in many people’s lives. 

So the stewards of the network have to consider that they hold an awesome responsibility, and that it might be time to stop thinking of the network as just a business tool, and instead, think about it as the circulatory system of human culture. 

Hold on – I think I just had a hippie moment brought on by high stress levels and lack of sleep.  It’s okay though.  I’m sure you get the idea. 

At the UBS 37^th annual Global Media and Communications Conference, Ralph de la Vega at AT&T mentioned that AT&T’s been having cellular data network problems because of heavy users – touting out the usual “80/20 rule” bandwidth hog rule (in this case, that 3% of users use 40% of the data) the company’s representative, Ralph de la Vega, suggested  to its investors that AT&T would likely introduce a pricing scheme that would penalize heavy data users, according to the LA Times.

We’ve written before about how the “X% of users use Y% of data” is kind of a boondoggle, but that doesn’t mean that congestion problems aren’t real for AT&T.

Which makes me wonder: If your data network couldn’t handle data streaming services for downloading web browsing, video, and applications, why, in fact, did AT&T team with Apple to sell a phone whose selling points were web browsing, video, and applications?

This is compounded with the idea that a lot of the problems have occurred in New York City, where AT&T rolled out the 850 MHz spectrum. The 850MHz spectrum travels further into office buildings and apartment complexes than the previous spectrum – and as a result data usage in the area went up 30%. 

Again – to me this seems like a case of infrastructure not being able to support the sales claims.  So the end result is that AT&T is trying to do the most difficult thing of all – trying to solve the problem by changing end-user behavior.  To their credit, AT&T is, at this moment at least, intending to use incentives to get people to use less bandwidth rather than punishments for heavy users. 

Still I feel a little frustrated.  Business Internet has been around for nearly, what, 15 years now?  How long will it take before people learn you don’t roll out new applications or services without baselining your performance and making sure that you have the infrastructure capable of supporting it. 

We’ve mentioned a lot about data caps, and why they’re not effective methods for controlling congestion, though they’re often sold as such to unwitting consumers. And we’ve done the analysis that shows that the effective speed of a capped plan can be slower than uncapped dialup – at least, when you average it all out.

But Benoit Felton of the Yankee Group went further. Sure, he does the math too, but points out that the users that are labeled as “bandwidth hogs” are hogs because they’re the top 5% of users – not whether those users actually cause performance problems.

The fact is that what most telcos call hogs are simply people who overall and on average download more than others… TCP/IP is by definition an egalitarian protocol. Implemented well, it should result in an equal distribution of available bandwidth in the operator's network between end-users; so the concept of a bandwidth hog is by definition an impossibility.

Now I'm pretty sure that many telcos will disagree with our assessment of this. So here's a challenge for them: in the next few days, I will specify on this blog a standard dataset that would enable me to do an in-depth data analysis into network usage by individual users. Any telco willing to actually understand what's happening there and to answer the question on the existence of hogs once and for all can extract that data and send it over to me, I will analyse it for free, on my spare time. All I ask is that they let me publish the results of said research (even though their names need not be mentioned if they don't wish it to be). Of course, if I find myself to be wrong and if indeed I manage to identify users that systematically degrade the experience for other users, I will say so publicly. If, as I suspect, there are no such users, I will also say so publicly. The data will back either of these assertions.

A great challenge, of course, and the right approach to it: Get the evidence. Make the analysis.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, too often both in ISPs and in enterprise networks, social network and video usage gets blamed for problems with network congestion without enough evidence. It’s true that bandwidth consumption can cause problems with network congestion, but if your congestion problems are caused by a misconfigured router or a slow application, blocking YouTube and chastising FaceBookers are not going to solve your network performance problems.

Sergey Claus and his helpers, (known collectively as Google Inc.), are planning to give out a few presents to travelers until after the new year – free WiFi at 47 airports. 

Which has me wondering – why isn’t WiFi free at all airports, all the time?  I understand that there’s certainly profit to be made if net addicts or people who simply don’t want to read on a plane pay $10 or $15 to access the Internet for a few hours on grueling layovers, but technology-wise, this seems a no-brainer.  Many airlines offer free wi-fi for business class travelers in their lounges, after all, and if Virgin can offer WiFi in flight, I think the technology has certainly arrived to handle people in a concentrated location on the ground.

Which caused me to wonder – what ever happened to all those plans to cover downtown areas in municipal WiFi?  Oh – that’s right.  It wasn’t profitable enough, so the private companies paid with public funds just decided not to roll them out.  Houston actually took the penalty paid by Earthlink for backing out on the contract to set up a fully public WiFi system in Houston’s poorer neighborhoods. 

What we have here is an “electric car” problem.  We have the technology, we have the ability, the engineering isn’t new, and there’s demand that can be met.  But because the status quo is more profitable with the current technology, the status quo is retained until something comes along which is completely disruptive.

One may think that such a disruption may come from the cellphone market; where 3G and 4G networks provide a promise of Internet interconnectivity anywhere from iPhones and Blackberries.  But even in this market, there are limitations.  Apple iPhones (connected to the AT&T network) have no data caps but cannot tether to laptops, and Verizon’s Droid, which promises tethering in the near future, has a very low data cap – 10GB for $60.  

And all of it comes about because it’s more important for private companies to maximize profit than to maximize technological saturation.  The winning solution isn’t always the superior technology.  You just don’t mind it so much, because most people aren’t aware of what could be. Again – an electric car problem.  We’ve had electric cars for over a decade now and most Americans don’t even know they ever existed – or were driven on Californian roads.  Similarly, people just accept the way things are at airports and in downtown areas, never wondering if things could be better.

The typical way to push superior technology into entrenched markets are either public investment in infrastructure or increasing competition and opening new markets; though I would imagine the barriers of entry into the ISP market are rather high.

But what we can learn from this is that we can – and indeed – have a responsibility to wonder.

Can things be made better?  Is the way we do things the best way.  Obviously, you need objective measurement but ideas should be tested by experiment and service levels need to be verified.  Because you never know.  Maybe there’s a better way. 

In May of this year, Nemertes Research president Johna Till Johnson wrote in Network World that “The Internet Sky Really Is Falling.”

The next day, we came out with a story about that column, in our much more irreverent style, entitled “That’s great, it starts with an earthquake: Is the Internet dying?”

In that article, we questioned the conclusions that they drew from evidence. To sum up, those conclusions were:

• 
  

  Nemertes believed that YouTube restricting high definition video to developing countries was a sign of the Internet outstripping backbone demand. We pointed out that such restrictions were due to local traffic problems and the lack of profitable business models in many developing markets.

  
  
• 
  

  Nemertes also pointed out that many cable carriers were instituting bandwidth caps and pay-per-byte pricing. We pointed out that we did an entire series on why usage caps don’t help with traffic congestion, and that ISPs that roll them out typically do so in generally non-competitive markets where they have other business interests (like cable TV and phone service) that compete with Internet access, and that there were plenty of counter-examples of companies (like Verizon and Cablevision) offering more bandwidth without caps.

  
  
• 
  

  And Nemertes pointed out the IPv4 shortage, for which there was already a solution, IPv6. (Though adoption rates have been slow, it does not mean the Internet will halt – simply that IPv6 changeovers will be more expensive the longer the delay.)

But the one thing we didn’t question was claim by Nemertes claims that Internet traffic will grow “exponentially” while Internet backbone will grow “linearly,” leading Nemertes to the conclusion that there will come a day when there will be Internet “brownouts.”

Recently, Johna Till Johnson published another column – this time in ComputerWorld, outright claiming that net neutrality legislation would mean the end of the Internet. That’s not hyperbole on my part – the headline is literally: “Hello net neutrality, goodbye Internet.”

And Ars Technica, a Conde Nast publication, decided to take another look at Nemertes’ evidence.

Essentially, Nemertes now claims (in the October article) that Internet growth creates a strain on last-mile access lines (Cable/DSL/FiOS) that makes it “excruciatingly expensive to upgrade,” that network neutrality would mean that you can’t charge different rates for different traffic, so backbone providers and carriers would start charging by the bit – or at least capping and charging for overages. Since bandwidth providers would now charge each other for the traffic on their networks, they would either raise subscriber rates dramatically or disconnect from the Internet entirely, literally killing the Internet as the entire thing breaks down into walled tiers like early 1990s Compuserve, AOL, & Prodigy.

Ars Technica, on the other hand, points out that the “excruciatingly expensive to upgrade” last-mile bandwidth isn’t exactly excruciatingly expensive compared to the profits that Internet service providers already generate with net neutrality and in most cases, without caps. Verizon, for example, is paying $18 billion for FiOS upgrades, but that’s the most expensive upgrade in the market, and Verizon finds it financially feasible to do so in a net-neutral market. For most ISPs, DOCSIS 3.0 (for Cable) and FTTN (for DSL) are very cheap solutions to increasing last-mile bandwidth.

As for the idea of the Internet fracturing, Ars Technica pointed out that ISP networks all exchange roughly the same amount of bandwidth; and an even trade is an even trade no matter how much it costs. There are many ways to recoup costs – but raising the rates on a competitor who can then turn around and raise rates on you doesn’t make any sense at all.

Or as Sevcik and Wetzel put it in Network World:

“Backbone ISPs and access ISPs must play nicely with each other to satisfy their customers' needs. Why for heaven's sake would they hurt their customers and themselves by balkanizing?”

What’s most worrying however, is that Ars Technica wrote that Nemertes idea of Internet growth outstripping capacity may be flawed.

According to the University of Minnesota MINTS project, the year-over-year growth of Internet traffic is not “50-100%” as Nemertes claimed in the ComputerWorld article, but “50-60%.” (Technically, “50-60%” is within the range of “50-100%” but it’s like estimating that a man that could be 5to 6 feet tall is “between 5 to 10 ft. tall.”) In Canada, where ISPs have to reveal traffic numbers due to network neutrality research by the Canadian government, they find that growth is slowing, year over year. 53% growth in 2006, but 32% growth in 2008.

We’ve found that when it comes to enterprise networks and IT in general, Nemertes Research is a valuable research organization. But in 2007, Nemertes made a prediction – a reasonable one, given the evidence at the time - about the Internet that did not come to pass. Instead of re-examining that prediction, they continue to insist – on openly contested arguments – that they were indeed right all along, even as, less than 3 months away from the ominous “2010” date, the Internet has managed to keep up with the demand of high-bandwidth YouTube HD files, NetFlix streaming, Skype Video-calling, video game downloads, and other high-throughput applications.

I think that what is actually happening, rather than demand for bandwidth outstripping supply, is that the supply of bandwidth creates its own demand, and that the new demand comes primarily from new applications. That is, HD video on the net is only in demand now that the networks have been shown to be able to handle that kind of capacity. YouTube didn’t start until there was enough capacity on the Internet to make SD video distribution feasible. Only later, when capacity grew, did YouTube roll out high quality video, and still later (after Vimeo proved it was feasible) did YouTube roll out 720p video content. When the network capacity can handle streaming 1080p video, then that will be the new standard. But no one is going to roll out 1080p video until the network can handle it.

This is not to be confused with the issues faced by enterprises when trying to allocate resources to business critical traffic over recreational traffic – where supply of recreational network traffic can be artificially restricted through QoS policies and traffic shaping in order to, presumably, lower the strain that recreational traffic puts on the network. Even so, most smart companies engage in capacity planning, making sure they have the bandwidth available to use new applications before those applications are rolled out. Teleconferencing, for example, is a business application that requires a great deal of bandwidth – but it’s of no use to an organization – and therefore not demanded – if the company network can’t support it. Or in other words, if the money saved from teleconferencing isn’t equal to or greater than the increase in network costs, smart companies are not likely to invest in teleconferencing.

In short, the sky is not falling. But keep an eye on your patch of it, anyway.

*delivered really slowly.

The Washington Post has an article on a phenomenon that we’re all familiar with – that advertised broadband speeds don’t always match up to the actual performance that the end-user actually receives. 

Actual broadband speeds lag advertised speeds by as much as 50% to 80%.

So more than half the time, and sometimes as much as eight out of ten times, consumers are paying for slower Internet access speed than they signed up for.

Now, with congestion, infrequent outages, problems on the other end of the connection, and other vagaries of Internet performance, the fact that a customer’s effective Internet speed varies widely isn’t a surprise. 

What is a surprise is that companies do not monitor the performance of their own networks – or that they do, but give consumers bad data – either promoting a peak speed as the “speed” of the network, or promoting an impossible speed. 

Really, though, do you think it would hurt sales that much to re-label a “15mbps” offering as “7-15mbps?”  (Hmm, maybe it would, if the ISP can’t consistently deliver 7mbps.) 

"This speaks to consumer empowerment. And if you are advertising one speed but delivering another, that takes power away," Kelsey said. "Consumers can't make accurate decisions based on quality of service from one provider off another."

Now, there’s the truth in advertising approach – add qualifications, like a speed range, or parenthetical like 15mbps (during off-peak times) – but I think the “up to” disclaimer is good if there’s someplace – say, the order form for the service, or the company Web site where you sign up for the service – that explains exactly what your real performance is after you sign up, as well as the performance of the average customer at each speed.  Heck, you could even have one of those LED billboards like they have for state lotteries that show you how much that day’s jackpot is worth. 

We’ve talked before about how we believe that broadband caps are not a solution to the problem and would greatly degrade the overall network performance of the Internet.  That’s still true.  We’re especially suspicious of any sort of “gas gauge” that would tell customers how much they’ve downloaded – and nothing else.  But a true network performance monitoring solution, giving ISP customers true information that is actually relevant to their performance would be very welcome. 

Imagine, if you will, if you could go to your ISP’s web page, log in, and get this information:

• Your average Internet Speed over the past two weeks is X/down, Y/up.


• Peak Congestion Times are X:00am to Y:00pm


• X% of your Internet usage occurs during peak times.


• Your average Internet Speed during peak times is X/down, Y/up.


• Your average Internet Speed during off-peak times is X/down, Y/up


• At that average speed, you can video at Xmbps.  This is (low/medium/high) quality for standard definition and (low/medium/high) quality for high definition video.


• Your latency is Xms round trip to our servers. You can expect (low/medium/high) quality for voice calls and video chat, and (low/medium/high) quality for computer gaming.


• Recommendations for improving your Internet Experience:




• Try to watch streaming video during off-peak times, or set your computer to download the video during off-peak times instead. 


• Set peer-to-peer programs to use less bandwidth during peak hours.


• Try to find gaming servers located closer to your geographic location to cut down on lag.


• We noticed a number of anomalous behaviors these past two weeks.  Please check your system for malware and viruses.

That’s not “techie” information – it’s all information the end-user can use, and it lets the user know exactly what they’re paying for. 

Network World reports that Wal-Mart is going to be selling an AMD-Sempron 2.1GHz powered laptop with 3GB of RAM for less than $300. It’s a bit more powerful than what we think of as a “netbook” – which can go for as little as $238.

We’ve talked about how netbook ownership has gone hand-in-hand with cloud computing, but it struck me that we seem to have passed a point long ago where hardware was not the limiting factor for desktop applications.

That is, there was a time, not too long ago, when digital video editing was impossible for many desktop and notebook computers. (I’ll be referring to video editing and rendering a lot, as it’s the most processor intensive item I can think of.) Professionals could spend thousands of dollars – or hundreds of man-hours – to create videos, but home movie making didn’t really take off until the hardware could push enough pixels in a short enough amount of time.

Encoding MP3s used to be a chore. DVD playback required onerous hardware requirements. There were just some things that you just couldn’t do without a fast computer. The “top of the line” computers could do things that “bargain” computers couldn’t.

I’m not sure exactly when, but I think that we hit the point where having a faster computer didn’t open new doors to you, it just made what you already do, faster. Differences in degree, not in kind.

Certainly, video editing and rendering is faster on a quad-core i7 chip than on a single-core Sempron, but the point is that you can do video editing on a Sempron if you are willing to wait a while for the finished product. If you know you’re going to do a lot of processor intensive stuff, like gaming, or video editing, or audio mastering, or protein folding, you may decide that having the more powerful computer is a worthwhile investment, but it’s no longer talking about “need” but “convenience.”

I may be wrong on this, and I may even sound naively like Charles H. Duell in 1899, but I think that 20 years from now, we’ll still be using computers to do the same things that we do today, just faster. We’ll all be editing 4k or 8k cinema instead of high def, but it’ll still be video editing. We’ll still be playing games and browsing the web, compiling spreadsheets, etc.

Which is another factor in the rise of the “Cheaptop”; the fact that a lower-powered, cheaper computer can do the same things as its expensive cousins.

We have not, of course, reached that stage of network development; there are things you can do with an expensive, robust network that you cannot do with a simple, cheap one. And cloud computing has a way to go; not just because we’ve yet to find workable replacements for all our desktop apps on the Web, but also because the real limitations in network performance make some tasks, especially those that require low latency (like gaming) or high throughput (like video editing) difficult.

But it’s also why people are trying to find solutions to putting gaming and video editing on the cloud – because the challenge is still there. The things we cannot yet do will not be desktop applications – the things we cannot yet do are things that we will be doing on the cloud. It’s why the hype is so powerful and pervasive with cloud computing – because we techies are always looking for the next big challenge, always looking at ways to do more things. Doing them faster is great – that’s engineering. But doing new things – that’s invention. And that’s a hell of a lot “sexier.”

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

I’ve been getting better and better with video as I’ve worked here – and I noticed that many people don’t really understand the nature of digital video files – what makes one file big, what makes one small, what makes one 20 MB file look good, while another 20 MB file looks lousy. 

Considering that Cisco is claiming that video will take up 90% of all traffic by 2013, it might be important go over some of the ideas about what makes up digital video files at the low level so that you can understand how they impact your network. 

If you already know this, I apologize. 

Digital video files are, essentially, pictures.  Multiple pictures played in sequence, with an audio track.  And like digital pictures, they can be compressed.  Uncompressed video is like a photo in BMP format – perfectly accurate, but huge.  Compressed video is like a JPG file – it creates artifacts, but is much smaller. 

There are many compression schemes, with advantages and disadvantages, based on different ways to compress the file.  Some are more effective at reproducing more accurate information with smaller filesizes, but ultimately, from a networking perspective, it’s really not important which you’re using.  What is important is the resolution, framerate, and bitrate. 

The resolution is the size of the video in terms of how many pixels you can see on screen.  It’s usually in varying rectangle sizes, but it’s usually expressed as the size of the rectangle (i.e., 640x480) rather than the absolute number of pixels.   High definition television comes in two types: 1920x1080 (a.k.a. “1080”) and 1280x720 (a.k.a. “720”), and “720” is the format used for YouTube high definition video.  Standard definition television comes as either 720x480 (NTSC) or 720x576 (PAL).  

The framerate is the number of frames – or pictures – that are shown each second.  In a filmed Hollywood movie, it’s typically 24 frames per second (or 24p).  On television, and with most recording equipment, they usually show 30 frames per second in the U.S. and 25 frames per second elsewhere in the world – though, in order to get faster motion, they often stagger every other line of resolution and place them between every other frame – so when you watch 30 frames per second of TV, you’re really watching 60 “half-frames” per second - also known as 60 interlaced frames  (or “60i”).

Finally, the bitrate is the number of bits of information that are in the file for each second of video.  A file with a bitrate of 512kbps has exactly 512 kilobits per second in order to convey all the information it can about the video.  With more bits, you can contain more information. 

Ultimately, the only thing impacting the network is the bitrate.  Bitrate determines filesize for downloadable video, and bitrate determines bandwidth requirements for streaming video.   A 3Mbps SD video will be the same filesize as a 3Mbps HD video, for example, provided that they are the same length. 

The quality of the video, however, is impacted by resolution and framerate as well as bitrate.  

In one second of 640x480 video at 30 frames a second, and 24 bits per pixel, you have 210 megabits worth of information.  Representing that, with, say 3 megabits is a daunting task.  On the other hand, if you increase the framerate to high definition – 1280x720 – you get 632 megabits of data per second – and representing that with only 3 megabits is an even more daunting task. 

The higher the bitrate, the higher the quality of the video; but the higher the resolution and framerate, the more you have to increase the bitrate in order to get the same level of quality.  High definition files tend to be larger than standard definition files because they’re usually – but not always – rendered at a higher bitrate. 

This was one of the reasons that when NBC was covering the Olympics, they often sent the raw footage from Beijing in low-resolution, low-bitrate formats, and only sent high-resolution files to their editors in the U.S. when they knew exactly which shots they wanted to include in their broadcasts.

By way of metaphor, think of bitrate as a fixed amount of butter that you have to butter bread.  You could spread out a single pat of butter on a whole loaf of bread, but it wouldn’t taste very buttery.  Or you could just butter one slice with that pat, but the bread wouldn’t be very filling.

Where different compression schemes come in is that they’re ways to use the limited amount of bits in each second of video to represent all the information – some compression schemes simply look better than others.  Right now, the leader seems to be H.264, which is about twice as efficient as the file system used to store information on a DVD (MPEG-2.)  A 3Mbps H.264 file and 3Mbps MPEG-2 file will have the same filesize, but the H.264 file will simply look better. 

Bitrate is also important because for streaming video, the bitrate of the video is equal to the amount of bandwidth required in order to show a video without pre-buffering or jitter – especially important for live applications like teleconferencing.  Lowering the bitrate decreases the quality, but image fidelity is often less important than immediate response time in teleconferencing applications.  (There are other issues that can cause jitter even with sufficient bandwidth, so it pays to monitor your communications network.)

At any rate, I hope you find this information useful when dealing with bandwidth.  At least now, when someone complains about how long it takes to download a video file, instead of spending tons of time and energy on network upgrades, you might want to ask if you can get a lower bitrate file instead. 

The Guardian reports that among teens, at least, peer to peer downloading of MP3 files of favorite songs is on the decline.  That’s good news for the RIAA labels, who can control the content on streaming sites more than they can control peer-to-peer networks. 

The bad news?  The teens are switching to streaming sites, like YouTube and Spotify. 

From the record company’s standpoint, this is a good thing – it’s a lot easier to control distribution to streaming sites, and taking down a single song with a DMCA notice takes the song down for everyone, as opposed to peer-to-peer, which cannot effectively be shut down at all.  But there are several differences between MP3 downloading and streaming which can impact corporate networks.

While peer-to-peer downloading does take up some bandwidth, the main problemswith P2P usage at work is the idea of liability for copyright infringement and computer security.  For that reason, it’s tempting for office workers who cannot get that song out of their head to, instead, go to YouTube, do a search for what you want to hear, and listen to the song online.  The first problem with this: Streaming audio and downloaded audio take up the same amount of throughput – but a downloaded song is likely to be downloaded once and listened to multiple times; streaming audio is likely to be downloaded multiple times each time the office worker wants to listen. 

The second problem: The listener may only want the music, but more often than not, YouTube video comes along with it.  So instead of 128-192kbps for an MP3 file, you’ve now got a 2-6Mbps video file to deal with. 

Now, even though the amount of traffic is increasing, you should have no problem handling it by classing streaming audio with non-business related traffic and monitoring your network to see if there are any changes in performance.