Othello

Workers who do their Christmas web shopping in the workplace are costing employers dearly in terms of productivity loss and increased bandwidth costs.
Last year, Forrester Research estimated 17 per cent of online holiday shoppers made their purchases from their workplace or on company time. This year, the explosion of MP3 music downloads and Internet radio stations is likely to exacerbate the problem, causing Internet bandwidth costs to rocket.
‘If, say, 500 employees are costing a company a minimum of $20 per hour and each does personal things on the Internet for an hour a day, that adds up to a lot of money—$10,000 per day,’ says Scott Thomas, a director of Net solution marketer McEvoy Thomas. The company is the primary reseller of SurfControl in Australia, Internet access control software adopted by One.Tel, North Ltd and Melbou...