The network impact of a Windows 8 RT device on your network.

Edited!

So someone had this question.  It’s a good one.  I didn’t know the answer so I found out….

 

Articles here and here would indicate that network traffic should be both intermittent and light.  So….lets check it out.

The Test:  I built a Windows 8 VM in my lab.  Updated it, updated default Windows Store Applications, created a new user account that I had never logged in as and then setup a netsh trace session from an elevated command prompt:

 

mkdir c:\trace

cd c:\trace

netsh trace LAN capture=yes report=yes tracefile=c:\trace\file.etl

 

And then I logged out and logged into the new ID.  The plan was to run it for 20-30 minutes but I went downstairs to talk to the wife and you know how that goes so an hour or so later I remembered my test!  Went upstairs and logged out, logged in as my administrator user and opened an elevated command prompt and did:

 

cd c:\trace

netsh trace stop

It looked like this:

 

Which isn’t horribly exciting, but the etl file and file.cab file are

So I put them on my debugging machine via SkyDrive and went to town.

The Results:

Very little traffic, most of it in spurts, every 5 minutes as expected. 

You can see it in the graphic above.  I’ll actually need to do a longer trace to get a better feel for statistics, but I wouldn’t sweat a Windows 8 RT or Pro device on your network.