North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Multicast Traffic on Backbones

  • From: Robert Beverly
  • Date: Mon Jun 11 15:39:35 2001

Deploying yet another box around the edge is expensive in terms
of capital, support and maintenance, particularly depending
upon the size of one's network edge.  Ideally, multicast provides
this at no additional cost excepting the engineering resources
involved.

We (Worldcom vBNS) see virtually no demand for mbone content or
other interdomain multicast.  However we are seeing a good deal of 
interest from customers interested in high bandwidth intradomain 
multicast (often as a replacement for satellite delivery).  For 
example, we are supporting multiple HDTV multicast streams 
(~20Mbps each) for customers today.  I am not sure that caches 
are an appropriate solution in this case.

rob
 
On Mon, Jun 11, 2001 at 12:43:19AM -0700, Sean Donelan wrote:
> 
> Folks have given a number of interesting multimedia applications using
> multicast, but I'm not sure any of them really need multicast.
> 
> Akamia/iBeam/Skycache, or any other set of large memory buffer boxes around
> the network edge, seem to be a much better way to replicate multimedia
> streams, and even provide the popular VCR start/pause/stop effect. This
> works well for single sourced (or limited source) multimedia streams that
> have very little interaction with the recipient (aka TV for the Internet).
> 
> Multicast seems to be more efficient for updating large buffer edge boxes
> than delivering the content directly to the end-user.