[49723] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: multicast (was Re: Readiness for IPV6)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Petr Swedock)
Tue Jul 9 15:36:59 2002
To: David Meyer <dmm@sprint.net>
Cc: David Sinn <dsinn@microsoft.com>,
Joe St Sauver <JOE@oregon.uoregon.edu>, bicknell@ufp.org,
nanog@merit.edu
From: Petr Swedock <petr@blade-runner.mit.edu>
Date: 09 Jul 2002 15:32:08 -0400
In-Reply-To: <20020709101638.A14681@sprint.net>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
David Meyer <dmm@sprint.net> writes:
> Here's my $0.02 on the whole multicast thing. We've been at this
> for a number of years now, and robust, ubiquitous multicast
> on the internet is really nowhere in sight.
1. The problems that multicast solves are also solved by the favorite
solution of business: buy your way out of the problem. Bigger
fatter pipes. More bandwidth. Beefier routers. The problems have
been addressed (papered over) by an alternate -easily implementable-
but not superior algorithm.
> Kind of sounds like
> QoS, and maybe there's a lesson there (20 years of research and
> IETF activity, yielding, well, what?).
2. The problems that Qos solves are also solved by the favorite
solution of business: buy your way out of the problem.
> Given the amount of time and resource we've spent on multicast,
> the question one might ask is "why hasn't multicast succeeded"?
goto 1. recurse.
I do think, however, that we've all gotten it quite wrong since the
beginning. Multicast is not a subset of IP. It is IP. With a
different view of the protocol, unicast IP is a multicast group of 2.
Broadcast is a multicast group of all... perhaps if the infrastructure
reflected that from the get-go, we wouldn't be in this situation.
Peace,
Petr
