How do I measure how much bandwidth Internet Radio hogs?

I was thinking about logging into Pandora at work like I do at home, but I'm concerned about sucking up all of the available bandwidth on the network with something that's not strictly work-related. I don't have a thorough technical understanding of how streaming content like Internet radio is delivered, so I don't really know how to measure the impact.

Can anyone offer any perspective on how much bandwidth Internet radio consumes relative to normal Internet browsing? Is there any way to measure how much I'm using for a specific site like Pandora?

Solution 1:

It depends on the Internet Radio site/stream... whether it streams at 32kbps, 64kbps, 128kbps, or more. Most streams are of the 128kbps variety.

I don't think there is a standard benchmark as to what bandwidth does "normal" internet browsing consumes, but let's just say if you choose a 64kbps stream, it consumes bandwidth at about 7 kilobytes per second, which is equivalent to 420 kilobytes per minute, which is equivalent to about 25 megabytes per hour - that is way less than if you were to watch YouTube for an hour straight.

Since watching YouTube is normal internet surfing activity now, I would say you are well within limits. ;)

Go ahead, play that funky music.

To measure the bandwidth usage of your net radio usage, you can try Bandwidth Monitor. Don't do anything for five minutes but stream radio, and it will give you a rough estimation of how much bandwidth is needed.

Solution 2:

For one user on a home connection, internet radio is fine. For that matter, just one internet radio user on a corporate network would be fine. But you're not just one user in isolation. You're one user out of many. Taken together, the bandwidth used for internet radio by all of you as a group ads up really quickly and can be a significant cost for a company.

The big difference between streaming content and normal web surfing is the bandwidth consumed by streaming content is constant, while normal page surfing only uses bandwidth in very short bursts.