Jerry Yang, David Filo, Terry Semel. Can you hear me? Your network took one hell of a beating...

Or did it?

So what can you expect from the Fifa World Cup site. We asked Brian Andrews, from networking specialists Black Box Network Services, to give us his considered opinion based on some of the pre-tournament footage on fifaworldcup.com "I tested out the service for highlights and on a 15 inch monitor it displays the game in a 3.5 x 2.75 inch window. I am running on what is effectively a 100Kbps connection. This is much higher than a 56Kbps modem which most people would use. "I did step up the connection to a 300Kbps LAN connection but there was not much improvement in picture quality. On all settings, the picture is not smooth by any means but it is watchable. This does look impressive on a broadband connection. "At 56K we actually got about a 38Kbps connection. It all started okay and there was motion in the picture. However, the picture size was reduced to a window of only 2 x 1.5 inches on a 14inch screen. But then the bandwidth seemed to disappear as it sometimes does with a modem connection and the picture gave screen updates about one frame every five seconds. It became completely unusable. "We then tried with a 64K ISDN connection and got a much more stable down stream. The picture size was still 2 x 1.5 inches but the picture flowed much more. "I would not pay for either of these types of connections. Only broadband presents a worthwhile watchable picture."