Watching your bandwidth utilization

Blocking may suck for the workers, but if the workers suck the bandwidth, then it sucks for the company. To wit,

"I know our people will say we're acting like Big Brother," says Mr. Cunningham of the new online-video ban. "But those pipes belong to the company. If management says we need to protect our resources, then that's what happens."

clipped from online.wsj.com Carriage Services Inc., a Houston funeral-services company, recently discovered that 70% of the workers in its 125-person headquarters watched videos on Web sites like Google Inc.'s YouTube and News Corp.'s MySpace for about an hour a day. "I almost fell out of my chair when I saw how many people were doing it and how much bandwidth those sites sucked up," says Jeff Parker, the company's information-technology administrator. He quickly blocked access to both sites.