"I worked for a number of years for the US Army...during their involvement in resolving the conflict in Bosnia. It may interest you to know that although we were responsible for a command and control system which was being used at the time to plan the movement of supplies and personnel between the various Army facilities in Hungary and Bosnia, that we were only allowed to download updates to our system (which was designed to be a real-time planning system) between 2am and 4am. The reason for this was that the generals in Bosnia and Hungary had a video conference set up and running between themselves and personnel in the Pentagon during the remaining time period. Not that it was ever in use, mind you. It was on 22 hours a day, showing pictures of empty rooms on both sides of the video conference. During the two months I actually spent in Bosnia, I believe that the video conference was only actually used for a total of about 3 hours. The rest of the time it was wasted bandwidth. Of course, the military thinks that YouTube et al are bandwidth hogs, and they're right. But the biggest wasters of bandwidth are not the troops, it's the brass. Wired has some similar testimony: "In Kosovo, the PowerPoint briefings got to be so big the whole [classified network] system regularly slowed down until it would take eight hours on occasion for an email to get through."
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Date: 2007-05-16 04:58 pm (UTC)http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/16/powerpoint_worse_bandwidth_hog_than_killbots/
"I worked for a number of years for the US Army...during their involvement in resolving the conflict in Bosnia. It may interest you to know that although we were responsible for a command and control system which was being used at the time to plan the movement of supplies and personnel between the various Army facilities in Hungary and Bosnia, that we were only allowed to download updates to our system (which was designed to be a real-time planning system) between 2am and 4am.
The reason for this was that the generals in Bosnia and Hungary had a video conference set up and running between themselves and personnel in the Pentagon during the remaining time period. Not that it was ever in use, mind you. It was on 22 hours a day, showing pictures of empty rooms on both sides of the video conference.
During the two months I actually spent in Bosnia, I believe that the video conference was only actually used for a total of about 3 hours. The rest of the time it was wasted bandwidth. Of course, the military thinks that YouTube et al are bandwidth hogs, and they're right. But the biggest wasters of bandwidth are not the troops, it's the brass.
Wired has some similar testimony:
"In Kosovo, the PowerPoint briefings got to be so big the whole [classified network] system regularly slowed down until it would take eight hours on occasion for an email to get through."