At work our IT guy doesn’t want us to watch streaming video. We’ve got finite web resources so I understand not wanting to use our connection for non-business things, but I was curious why downloading a video was fine, but streaming it wasn’t.

Enter our friends at Stanford on iTunesU. I love all things technical, so since it was free, I downloaded the course “The Future of the Internet”. It’s a great primer on some basic internet issues.

In this course, the teacher talked about the difference between a couple of protocols. TCP/IP is the basic protocol on the internet. It provides reliable transmission of data and is “polite” about it. It takes available bandwidth, but throttles back as bandwidth becomes congested. It’s used for most traffic on-line including web and ftp.

UDP is different. It cares more about getting more most of the data from point a to point b than about getting it all there. VOIP and streaming video use UDP. UDP also just uses all available bandwidth and only scales back if the bandwidth isn’t available at all. It’s clueless about other traffic.

Fast forward to today. I’m ftp’ing a file from our main campus at 8:30. All is well and even though service starts at 9:30, the file should be done by 9:15. All is well until about 9:00. At that point, the main campus starts their first service and also starts streaming video to the world. I notice that my connection starts getting slower and slower. I do a speed test and all is well on my end. No one in Lexington is noticing the problem as they watch video, but my connection keeps getting slower and slower. Ninety minutes later my download (which should have taken fifteen) is done. The last few bits came in at dial-up speeds.

Then, I realize what happened. It’s a function of the network. I’ve experienced why I shouldn’t do streaming video at work. It hogs bandwidth. Now it’s clear and I’ve got a story to tell in the morning.

Paul