how much bandwidth does IM use vs. email and web pages?

Question

our company is looking at shutting down our IM believing that it uses to much badthwidth and slows our credit card processing

Answer 1

IM uses much more bandwidth the either email or web pages. With a web page, you are only using bandwidth when you change to a new page and it has to download. If you spend 10-20 minutes looking at a single page, you use no bandwidth. So web pages are the smallest of the three.

E-mail is next. It has to go out and check for new mail, but that usually only once ever 15 minutes. If you only have one e-mail account, that is one check (and maybe a download of messages) every 15 minutes. Add any messages you send and the average is about 5-10 uses of the bandwidth in any average hour.

Then you get IM. Every notice how fast messages come to you in IM compared to e-mail? That is because the IM checks each account for new messages every few microseconds. If you have 20 or 30 contacts, that 20-30 uses of the bandwidth every few microseconds just checking for messages. Then add in the time for sending and receiving them. A single IM user can use the same as about same amount of bandwidth as 25-50 e-mail users, are a couple hundred web page surfers. They absolutely can bring a network to a crawl.

Your company is probably correct that if it is allowing an IM program to run that it will slow the response for everything else on their network.

Answer 2

IM's dont use much bandwidth, its the IM software which slows down your PC. Also, nowadays IM's are integrated onto Webpages. One of the websites which allows you to access IM servers like Yahoo, MSN & AOL is http://www.meebo.com
this website uses Java plugins in the Internet explorer to simulate an IM software.
Softwares like Oulook express connect to the Email server every 5 or 10 minutes(you can set this interval manually).
Alternately in some companies, they have a local Instant messaging (IM) server with restricted access in the company network.

Answer 3

Basically IM doesn't use much bandwidth this only applies when you are chatting. But IM also has the capibility to use phone, video and file sharing. Combine all that, and you may have a problem.
But, if chatting is all that people do at your office, then IM isn't the issue.
You can use a network sniffer to localize the problem or contact someone that has experience.

Answer 4

It barely uses anything. It basically just sends text. Something else is slowing down your bandwidth, or you need to increase your bandwitdh.