Lexington, MA -- (SBWIRE) -- 06/21/2010 -- Ipswitch Inc.’s Network Management Division, developer of the WhatsUp Gold suite of innovative IT management solutions, today released the results from its World Cup Network Traffic Calculator. Over the past two weeks, WhatsUp Gold has collected over 1000 responses related to average bandwidth use and the predicted increase during the 30 days of the tournament in network traffic directly related to the World Cup.

Key findings:

* Bandwidth use is expected to increase by 38.85% in participating World Cup Nations to 86.89% during matches
* In Europe the figure is expected to double, from 40.25% current average bandwidth use, to 78.67% during key match times
* In the UK, despite the culture for some businesses to close during England matches, bandwidth use is still expected to increase by 30.79% to 71.85% of total capacity.
* In host nation South Africa, IT Managers are bracing themselves for network bandwidth to be completely maxed out to 100% from a base average of 58% during a typical working day.
* Despite not being typically thought of as a football watching nation, the US is somewhat surprisingly expecting bandwidth use to rise to over 80% during some key matches

“There is a real growing feeling that this year’s FIFA World Cup in South Africa could be the most exciting yet, however the impact on businesses could be huge, as shown by the results of our survey. Your business depends on your network for successful operation. Users making use of video streaming services can put a considerable strain on companies' networks, resulting in bandwidth chokes and even outages, in addition to exposing them to security threats,” said Ennio Carboni, president, Ipswitch, Inc.’s Network Management Division.

The 2010 World Cup will be the first in the history of the tournament where every game will be streamed online live, as well as being the first World Cup to offer high definition coverage of the tournament. In the UK, matters are further complicated by the majority of games taking place during normal office working hours. As a result, service providers and employers are bracing themselves for potential network disruption and pressure on internet connectivity as consumers and staff turn to streaming video as a way to keep tabs on the sporting action.

The precedent for online streaming of major sporting events was set with the 2008 Olympic Games. US broadcaster NBC opted to concentrate its live coverage online due to time zone constraints. As a result, NBCOlympics.com served up more than 1.2 billion pages and 72 million video streams during the 2008 Summer Games**, more than doubling the combined traffic to its site during the 2004 Summer Games in Athens and the 2006 Winter Games in Turin. Traffic to NBCOlympics.com peaked each day around noon as office workers checked in during the lunch hour.

While service providers struggle to maintain adequate access for all their customers, organisations face multiple problems during these artificial demand peaks within the LAN such as constrained WAN connectivity and heightened security risks created by users venturing to untrusted and unknown sites in search of video content not available from official broadcast streams.

During the world cup, IT Managers are invited to contrast their actual findings to those that were predicted at http://www.whatsupgold.com/calculators/world-cup-network-traffic.aspx

About the Network Management Division of Ipswitch, Inc.
The Network Management Division of Ipswitch, Inc. is the developer of the WhatsUp Gold suite of innovative IT management software. WhatsUp Gold delivers comprehensive network, system, application and event log monitoring and management solutions for small and medium businesses and enterprises. Built on a modular, yet integrated architecture, the affordable and easy-to-use solutions scale with the size and complexity of any physical or virtual IT infrastructure. From a single console, WhatsUp Gold supports standard IT management tasks including automated discovery, mapping, real-time monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting and reporting. More than 100,000 networks worldwide use WhatsUp Gold solutions to assure the availability, health and security of their critical business infrastructure today.

Ipswitch, Inc.’s Network Management Division recently added to its product line complete, easy-to-use solutions for Windows Security Event Management (SEM) and Log Management for small businesses and enterprise-level organizations suite with the acquisition of Dorian Software Creations, Inc. WhatsUp Gold was named Network Management Product of 2010 by Network Computing Magazine and earned the Network Products Guide 2010 Product Innovation Award in Network Management.

To learn more about WhatsUp Gold – the best value in IT Management software, download a free trial or to make a purchase, please visit: http://www.whatsupgold.com/products/download/