Internet "Event" Calendar

[#1]

Hi Everyone,

As part of some work I'm doing regarding traffic management I'm creating a traffic management roadmap of Internet events that may influence our network performance, cause an increase (or decrease) in usage or require new signatures or profiles creating to ensure the traffic correctly prioritised.

The intention is to be able to pro-active rather than reactive so that we can add new game signatures before or as the games are released or be able to watch for the "next big thing". YouTube a year ago for example was just another site, today it's using at peak around 7% of our bandwidth. We need to be on look out for the sites and applications that could become the "new YouTube" (in terms of how much they are being used necessarily in the type of content). So that could be another video sharing, The Pirate Bay are understood to be setting one up, or something like Joost or something no-one's heard of yet, but with your help being our extra eyes and ears we can be on top of things.

We also need to use the calendar to track events that can create an increase or decrease in usage. For example, a major sporting event like Wimbledon that is broadcast over the Internet would expect to see an increase in streaming video. Something like a cricket test match may see people listening to live radio commentary online, school holidays may cause more daytime usage, a sunny bank holiday less evening usage or snowfall cause more VPN traffic as people work from home.
For a starter I've attached below my events calendar spreadsheet below, I'm not sure whether I expect this document to stay as a spreadsheet as I'd like to see this become a "living" document that anyone can contribute to with events and new sites, games, applications, etc. as they come along or are announced however big or small.
And as such it's over to you, what sort of format do you think would work best? A collaboratory Wiki which anyone can add new events to or a spreadsheet/web page administered by a person or group?
And just as importantly what events do you know of that we can add?
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[#2]

What about a google calendar? 

[#3]

Cracking idea Dave!
As a bit of a sport nut then things such as the Golf US Open is on this weekend, the O/S has webcasts albeit only for US peeps but its likely it may well be on via some Asian p2p tv view somewhere as most football Premier league games are too (most football is tbh). Not that I condone that of course.
The Masters (golf) in Augusta is normally the first weekend in April, this year I watched quite a bit from the BBC site which was good, sure its some time away but planning ahead is what its all about. Similarly for the World Snooker, on the BBC site for 2 weeks until the Mayday bank holiday.
Football fixture lists out on Thursday this week, a new dawn of optimism until the bubble bursts on the first match (the joys of following Sheff Wed!), so offical club sites and SKY/BBC sport sites will be hit hard around midday when I think they are announced.
Away from sports stuff in TV land you have Prison Break Season 3 due August 29th according to IMDB
Its exact time is still completely up in the air but Windows Vista SP1 will be popular (early contender for understatement of the year), its rumoured to already be out there in trial mode, but expect it to be 2nd half of 2007 (http://bink.nu/Article9325.bink)

[#4]

Cheers James, added them all in. Vista SP1 could be a big one, depends how big Microsoft make the installation files.

[#5]

great idea dave!

[#6]

Tommo,
Was reading the blog below yesterday and saw thought it best to highlight Euro2008 as streaming matches via the BBC website will be big especially if matches are mid-afternoon when people are at work
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/sporteditors/2007/06/euro_2008_on_the_bbc.html
James

[#7]

They're keen! Only a year early!

[#8]

All the same, worth noting down.

[#9]

From a gaming perspective, how about the World of Warcraft patch days?
They usually occur on a Wednesday (altho, not every wednesday there is a ptach download) and ofc they use a Bittorrent-derived client.
So, perhaps the Ellacoyas can detect whether there is a connection to the wow-europe.com update tracker, and maybe offer a little more bandwidth on the P2P ports?  Also, http://www.wowwiki.com/Patch_Mirrors lists mirrors for http downloads which might list suitable targets to prioritise.
Anything to feed my addiction
Also, we have Age of Conan coming out soon - I would suspect that the beta and opening days will cause a surge in traffic as the post-beta patch downloads will most certainly suck some precious bandwidth.
Barry

[#10]

Quote from: Kelly

What about a google calendar?

Or upcoming? Most of these events will already be on upcoming so just create a user to tie them all together. Maybe.

[#11]

Oh - how about the ticket rush for Glasto 2008? ;);)
Barry

[#12]

A Level results day? I imagine a lot of people will be logging onto ucas.com all at once

[#13]

Yeah, but that's all just HTTP stuff - that won't have any significant effect on network capacity in use. It's stuff like streaming video, downloading files etc. that're the main ones to look out for, I would have thought.

[#14]

Doesn't necessarily have to be a significant impact on the volume of traffic in itself, could be that it's a lot of people trying to do one thing at the same time like the Glastonbury tickets. While the A level results may mean that firstly there's people logging on to Ucas but also emailing people or using IM or sites like MySpace and Facebook.
The last Big Brother seemed to cause an upturn in the volume of email (not looked to see if it's the same this year), not exactly huge in traffic terms but noticeable on the mail graphs.
Also the little things can easily add up, it's useful to track if things coincide, as you say A level results and Glastonbury tickets sales might not have an impact on their own but what if they were both on the same day? Or that day was a Microsoft patch Tuesday?

[#15]

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Or that day was a Microsoft patch Tuesday?

Which becomes a wednesday, then they realise it doesnt patch properly so its witheld to thursday, late on thursday they say its not ready, maybe tomorrow, go back friday no update, no update over the weekend, its silently added first thing monday morning.. so yeah - microsoft would be a bad example, as you aint got a clue when the patch is release (e.g. Any sign of XP SP3 which they tried to quietly slip out?)
Oh and i thought people who need vast amounts of BW are sourcing it from all over the place.. one site i use *quite abit* at the moment is tv-links.co.uk - and each item is on a mirrow elsewhere - would this make things alot more difficult to prioritise? or could you collate it from the website? Just curious 🙂 -- this usage would go up when school / college finishes - i know because all my classmates no about it and normally sit talk about the episode were all watching.. nothing like watching it on 10mb connection through college tho! 😄

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Doesn't necessarily have to be a significant impact on the volume of traffic in itself

Absolutely, not just that many connections going to the same place tends to slow things down alot... (e.g. best way for a user to notice is set a Bittorrent client to half your line speed.. on upload and 0 on download, the amount of connections could be 150 different peers.. each sending very little, but because its got to keep all those connetions alive - you end up with one dead connection! - - - or is that just me ? 😄 )