Procter & Gamble bans Netflix and Pandora

NEW YORK – When Procter & Gamble shut down some access to the Internet this week, it wasn't to keep employees from messing around on Facebook or crafting personal e-mails on company time.

"We are one of the more lenient companies in terms of providing access to the internet, however there are some sites which don't serve a specific business purpose - in such a case, Netflix and Pandora," Procter& Gamble spokesman Paul Fox said in an e-mail. "They are both great sites, yet if you want to download movies or music, do it on your own time."

The dawn of the Internet age

Since the dawn of the Internet age, companies have struggled with how to handle personal computer use during employees are on the clock. It's not rare for companies, both large and small, to ban some or all personal Internet and even e-mail use.

But, as more and more businesses need Web access to function, and as web content becomes more data-intensive, many are struggling with a so-called bandwidth "spectrum crunch."

Wireless carriers are as well struggling with the issue. The growth of the smartphone and tablet markets have dramatically increased the amount of data being accessed at any given time.

Global mobile data traffic is just about doubling every year and will continue to do so through anyway 2016, according to Cisco's Mobile Visual Networking Index, the industry's most comprehensive annual study.

Steve Feller, a steering committee member of an IT professional group in Cincinnati, where Procter & Gamble is based, told the Cincinnati Enquirer that social networking and other personal computer use has become a serious concern at some companies, threatening to slow the flow of data.

But it's not just employees. Companies themselves are using the web more. The rise of cloud computing means that a lot of data that once would have been stored internally is being accessed from the web, at times multiple times in a day.

The most digitally advanced companies in the world

"As P&G drives to become one of the most digitally advanced companies in the world, more and more of our business processes, applications and systems are being web enabled," Fox said in the e-mail. "That in turn makes bandwidth capacity and availability moreover critical."