Why do Kaleidescape components seem to generate so much network traffic?
The components of the Kaleidescape System talk regularly to each other over the network. Each Kaleidescape component broadcasts a single packet of less than 200 bytes every second. This low bandwidth activity may seem like a lot of traffic because the lights on the network switch may blink frequently even when the Kaleidescape System is not being used to enjoy movies and music. But even for a large Kaleidescape System with twenty or thirty components, this only results in twenty or thirty broadcast packets per second. This is not an unreasonable number of broadcasts for network devices to handle. Well-designed consumer-grade IP network devices are designed to handle much higher traffic (millions of bytes per second) and, for comparison, a single movie stream can be more than one million bytes per second.
