North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: multicast (was Re: Readiness for IPV6)

  • From: Leo Bicknell
  • Date: Tue Jul 09 10:54:06 2002

In a message written on Tue, Jul 09, 2002 at 10:39:35AM -0400, Jared Mauch wrote:
> 	They aren't aware of the savings they can see, consider the
> savings too small, don't know how to configure, can't configure,
> break the config, etc.. the list goes on and on.

Speaking from a provider who used to run multicast, and now doesn't:

Customers don't want it.

I can count our customer requests for multicast on both hands for
the last two years.  Of those, only one thought it was important,
the rest were just playing with it.  In fact, pretty much the only
place we see it anymore is on RFP's from educational groups.

My own view is that customers don't want it, because end users
don't have it.  Dial up users will probably never get multicast.
So that leaves Cable Companies (good luck for them to do something
intelligent) or DSL providers (perhaps they might) to make it
happen.  If a few million end users could just 'get it', then people
running streaming services would be beating on backbone providers
to carry it around.

There is also a payment problem.  If a unicast bit enters your
network, you can be assured it takes one path to the destination.
When a multicast bit enters your network, it could take one path,
or it could take 50 paths through your network.  The latter does
cost the ISP more.  This also makes peering an issue, as many people
use ratio.  If there was a significant amount of multicast traffic,
hosting ISP's would send end-user ISP's one small stream that they
would then replicate.  That would pretty much make the ratio
completely opposite of what it is today, due to unicast streaming.

I'll be the first to jump on the multicast bandwagon, but I don't
work for an eyeball provider.  The first adopters need to be DSL
and cable modem providers, to the end user, on by default.  Then
we can go somewhere.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - [email protected] - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Read TMBG List - [email protected], www.tmbg.org