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.

Instead, it was to get them to quit sucking up the company’s Web bandwidth by listening to music and watching movies.

In a memo Tuesday, the company, which sells everything from Tide detergent to Pringles to Duracell batteries, told its 129,000 employees they can no longer use music-streaming site Pandora or movie site Netflix at work.

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

According to the memo, an internal report found that P&G employees were watching 50,000 five-minute YouTube videos and listening to 4,000 hours of music on Pandora on a typical day. At one point, the company’s Web capacity was overtaxed, “requiring immediate interaction,” the memo said.

Source: CNN

Even at Procter &Gamble, Bandwidth has a price !