Posted: 31st Jul, 2010 By: MarkJ

The latest independent survey of 1,000 workers from business ISP
Star UK has found that 72% of British workers spend their lunch hour online and performing activities like shopping, banking, catching up with the latest sport or chatting to their friends on email or Facebook.
The research was conducted after Star noticed that the network bandwidth usage for business Internet traffic in their data centres was consistently peaking between 12:00 – 14:00hrs, which is normally when British workers should be enjoying their lunch breaks.
The most popular lunchtime habits for 63% of people are checking their personal email accounts, engaging in online shopping and banking (62%), and 31% catch up with friends on social networking sites like Facebook – unsurprisingly this trend was higher ( 40%) for younger workers between the ages of 16 to 34 years.
John Adey, Chief Operating Officer of Star, commented:
"We believe that the high Internet traffic volumes during the 12:00 – 14:00hrs time frame indicates that employers are taking a liberal approach to allowing employees access to the Internet during the lunch hour for non work related activities. However, the use of high bandwidth intensive applications like live sports and catch-up TV could mean that businesses may have to increase their bandwidth capacity to support their employees’ lunchtime surfing habits.
Another issue worth thinking about is that accessing non work related sites could leave their business open to a greater risk of employees downloading malware onto the corporate network. Whilst there are many benefits to having a liberal policy to Internet use it seems the potential risks and costs are being ignored.
Star would always suggest that UK businesses continue to benefit from giving people access to the content they want during non-working hours but do so in a safe way. The ideal way to do this is via dedicated computers that are not connected to the corporate network which mitigates the risk of anyone introducing any threats or leaking sensitive company data."
One in three British workers spend their lunch time watching online sports or checking out the latest sports results. Interestingly, more men (16%) admitted to watching catch-up TV, compared to only 7% of women. On the other hand, 37% of women spend their time on social networking sites, compared to 25% of men.