Our story about Sun asking its staff to restrict use of the Internet has produced a furious backlash from company insiders.

It seems the email is sent out by Sun's IT department every year and is designed to raise awareness about the need to conserve WAN bandwidth. The company does not do this to cut costs, apparently.

At the end of the financial year Sun regularly sees a huge upswing in traffic on its leased lines generated by traffic flowing from its ERP systems during a period when many deals are closed.

Basically Sun doesn't want Web surfing or emails with huge attachments to limit the flow of such traffic. Fair enough but this still leaves the important question of why Sun doesn't rely on traffic prioritisation features, which ship as standard with many routers, rather than asking its users to behave themselves. ®