A survey commissioned by US-based company Ipswitch has found that about 67% of IT administrators are facing network IT and network problems as streaming of World Cup matches strains networks.

Among those surveyed, about 70% say that video streaming of matches is adversely impacting employee productivity, network and application performance and overall business operations.

Ipswitch customer solutions executive VP, Ennio Carboni, said: "The World Cup has clearly become more popular than ever in the US, both at home and at the office.

"Today’s midday match between the United States and Germany has the potential to create one of the biggest Wi-Fi traffic spikes in IT management history.

"And as a result, worker and application productivity may take a hit, while the hard-working IT professionals may unfairly get the equivalent of an orange card for network management."

Similar surge in bandwidth demand was already witnessed during other major sporting events like Winter Olympics in Sochi and the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament earlier this year.

Despite knowing that the large scale events like the World Cup will spike bandwidth demand, only 53% of the IT administrators of those sampled said that they have a proactive network management plan to meet the surge in traffic.

Those who have already outlined plans to meet the demand were mostly concerned with monitoring or limiting streaming activity.

About 72% of the IT administrators said that they are setting threshold alarms to prevent such a bandwidth spike, while 60% of them are monitoring top applications, 60% of them are blocking certain websites.

About 32% of those surveyed are encouraging employees to watch the matches from a centralised location to prevent network clogging.

Desktops and laptops are the most popular devices for watching World Cup matches with 90% of them watching on them, while 83% prefer to watch on their smartphones and 65% prefer to watch the matches on tablets.

Ipswitch sampled more than 200 IT professionals in the US to find out how the FIFA World Cup is impacting network performance in an organisation network.

Photo Courtesy: FreeDigitalPhotos.net