It’s March again, a time for putting down fertilizer on the lawn, a time for celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, and a time to watch your Internet utilization spike through the roof.

I’m a Blue Coat ProxySG and Websense customer so I have some options at my disposal to help stem the flood from both my public/guest (WiFi) networks and my internal networks. However, even with those tools available it can be a real challenge these days to try and filter just the unwanted content out of the network, especially if you’re charged with only blocking the streaming content of the site and you are required to keep basic site access working. So there’s no blocking ncaa.com/* because that would block basic site access.

I currently have about 15,000 devices on my internal network and I average around 3,000 public devices daily on my public/guest networks. The public/guest networks routinely consume around 50Mbps of Internet traffic and the bulk of the public/guest networks are setup on our internal 802.11b/g wireless networks. So I need to be concerned about the performance of the wireless networks themselves and not just the Internet gateway/firewall.

I’m sure there are going to be dozens if not hundreds of different ways for users to find the content. I’ve already spotted a few users trying to connect via Slingbox and there are multiple apps on Google Play and the Apple Store that offer to stream the games to your mobile device over WiFi (our public/guest networks).

Here are the list of URLs that I’m starting with. I’m hoping this should help curb 50%-75% of the traffic, I’ll need to evaluate whether it will be worth the effort to go looking for the remaining 25%.

• *.turner.ncaa.com
• www.ncaa.com/mml

If you are a smaller organization you might want to have a look at OpenDNS. It’s very easy to implement and is very cost effective.

I’m curious what other people are doing, if anything? Do you already have your network locked down so this isn’t an issue? If you have a public/guest network do you allow access? Do you have any challenges based on the size of your network?

Cheers!