Can businesses win during the world cup?

With the World Cup fast approaching, in previous years, businesses would perhaps be concerned with losing man hours and productivity due to employees taking sickies in order to watch it.

However, with the advances in technology we’ve seen in recent years in terms of improved bandwidth to allow the download speeds necessary for  live video streaming, employees no longer have an excuse to take a day off when they can watch football matches from their desktop at work!  Rackspace is proud to have been at the forefront of such technology changes and developments which has made video streaming possible.

A recent article on sky news noted that more than half of working Britons (54%) are planning to watch the World Cup on their work computer.  However this has the potential to impact businesses in another way, as watching it at work could hamper day to day business operations through slowing the Internet connection by consuming all available bandwidth, especially for England v Slovenia which has a 3pm kick off time.

It may be advisable for companies to develop guidelines or even screen the world cup in their office to avoid network congestion and slow the performance of business web applications such as Email and Internet connections.