This may be a really stupid question, but...
The TDS protocol used by sql server appears to use unicode or UTF-16 character encoding. A query like select foo from bar
appears like
s.e.l.e.c.t. .f.o.o. .f.r.o.m. .b.a.r
in the tcp stream in wireshark.
If you have an application connecting to SQL server over a network, that absolutely does not and probably never will use unicode text fields, is there a way to tell the sql client to encode the queries in ascii to cut network traffic?