If you work at a big company, such as Procter & Gamble, you might work in a cubicle for several hours a day at the company"s headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio. You might even want to take a little time off from work to surf the net at work or listen to some music. However, it looks like lots of people at Procter & Gamble were doing the same thing, and for a lot longer than just a few minutes.
In an article on the Cincinnati Enquirer, a recently leaked memo said that the company was blocking their workers from accessing two popular Internet services; the movie and TV streaming video site Netflix and the music streaming service Pandora. The internal memo said that P&G workers were streaming and listening to a whopping 4,000 hours of music a day on Pandora.
The situation had become so bad that the amount of bandwidth that was being used for non-work activities was adversely affecting P&G"s network, according to the memo. In fact, it stated that a quarter of the company’s bandwidth was being used for non-work purposes and that it would cost $15 million a year to add more bandwidth to keep up.
P&G has also cut off surfing the web for non-work related projects, according to the article. Facebook and YouTube access have not been cut off completely because the company uses both for marketing and other work purposes. However, the memo said that 50,000 YouTube videos were being viewed per day on the company"s network before the new policies went into effect.
The situation at P&G is not a unique case. Other large companies in the Cincinnati area have put in similar policies. GE Aviation, which has 7,500 employees, has blocked access at work for Pandora, YouTube and Facebook, although some people who use those services for work can still ask for access.