Hike in bandwidth use opens doors for sales

Own goal: UK bandwidth use will swell to 72 per cent

Channel firms could cash in on the anticipated hike in business bandwidth usage resulting from employees attempting to watch the football World Cup.

Research from networking monitoring specialist Ipswit­ch found that, across all competing countries, bandwidth use is expected to increase by almost 40 percentage points to 86.89 per cent.

And business bandwidth in host nation South Africa is anticipated to max out, up from a typical average of 58 per cent usage.

In Europe, the figure is expected to increase almost twofold, with bandwidth usage soaring to 78.67 per cent from an average of 40.25 per cent. The UK will be less severely affected than some, but bandwidth use will still swell 30.79 points to 71.85 per cent.

Mike Silva, EMEA sales director of Ipswitch’s Net­work Management Division, said: “Large organisations [tend to] have a bigger pipe,” he said. “But the smaller guys are not quite up to speed.

“One of the big issues is voice-over IP infrastructure; com­panies with call centres will have to keep an eye on bandwidth and the quality of calls could be affected.”