[49719] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: multicast (was Re: Readiness for IPV6)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Eric A. Hall)
Tue Jul 9 14:57:24 2002
Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2002 13:25:01 -0500
From: "Eric A. Hall" <ehall@ehsco.com>
To: Stephen Sprunk <ssprunk@cisco.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
on 7/9/2002 11:49 AM Stephen Sprunk wrote:
> I think a bigger issue is that multicast is only truly compelling for
> high-bandwidth applications, and there's just not a critical mass of
> users with enough bandwidth to justify deployment today.
Multimedia is the common example but I actually find multicast more useful
for common administrative services like NTP. I've also done some simple
research into multicast DHCP (goodbye mandatory unicast proxies) and DNS
(goodbye mandatory unicast proxies) which has looked promising for the
small investigative work done. In this regard, multicasting the small
chatter stuff is actually much more compelling, although these examples
all apply to a local administrative scope and not to multicasting across
the Internet in general.
The issue with the latter is that there is no killer app which requires
it. As a result, ISPs don't offer it, firewalls/NATs don't support it, and
so forth. I've never had a network connection which supported it.
--
Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/
