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Streaming audio slows network business traffic by George Spain  CCIT Technical Publisher Listening to the radio at work used to be a matter of keeping the volume down so you didn't disturb your neighbor. Since streaming audio has become popular, however, now listening to music or talk is more like choking your neighbor. Streaming audio means, simply, listening to broadcasts via computer. More and more people at MUSC are doing it and the impact is a costly one. “Streaming audio is like downloading a very large file that never ends,” said Melissa Forinash, director of the Center for Computing and Information Technology (CCIT). “It takes up time and space that others could be using and it costs money—an estimated $15,000 a year,” she said.  A recent spot check by administrators in the network systems team (NST) turned up “300 IP addresses have used streaming audio in the last week,” said David Sisco of the NST. In addition, C. Frank Starmer, associate provost for Information Technology, adds, “The only way to insure that the majority of essential (network) traffic reaches MUSC is to curtail use of streaming audio.” Shipwrecked in the stream When you play a radio at your desk, you may or may not be annoying your neighbor; when you stream audio to a set of computer speakers or headphones, you are definitely taking something away from your neighbor. That thing is called bandwidth. There's only so much of it, we pay dearly for it (about  $63,000 last year), and, at times we get very close to running out of it. “During our peak times (9 a.m.— 5 p.m.), we consume 100 percent of our available Internet bandwidth (from our ISP InfoAvenue). On a typical day, 25 percent of this traffic is streaming audio, people listening to music from Spinner, MSRadio, real.com, mtv.com, netradio, and others. At current prices, the bandwidth used by music is costing about $15,750 a year,” said Sisco.  So now you know it is resource intensive and costly; you should also know that it violates the “Appropriate and Reasonable Use” clause of MUSC Computer Use Policy (CUP). Further, the CUP states:  Personal use of university computing and network resources is restricted by State law. Users should refrain from interfering with other users (for example, consuming gratuitously large amounts of limited system resources). OK, now you know it's bad; what can you do about it? First, ignore links in your browser that feed “live audio” or “live video.” As tempting as it may be to play music through your computer (especially all that commercial-free stuff that you can't hear on local radio), it takes up space that is urgently needed for patient care and company business. If you know of a live feed that is business-related, gather a group around a single computer, or, if it is important enough, arrange for a wired meeting room. A higher pitch Although system administrators don't want to take any overt action (such as shutting off the main sources of streaming audio to everyone), if voluntary efforts aren't effective in reducing bandwidth consumption, it may come down to blocking. And, though they don't routinely monitor the type of connections going to and from computer workstations, the administrators can tell if a particular computer is frequently using a lot of bandwidth on streaming audio. It is possible that, in the future, violators may be politely warned of their bandwidth hogging and asked to knock it off.