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Re: multicast (was Re: Readiness for IPV6)

  • From: Chris Parker
  • Date: Tue Jul 09 11:11:54 2002 
At 10:51 AM 7/9/2002 -0400, Leo Bicknell wrote:
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.
Yahoo/Broadcast.com pushed this pretty heavily.  MS's own media player
supports multicast, so there definitely a *lot* of clients out there.

http://broadcast.yahoo.com/home.html

There are a list of providers supporting multicast in conjunction with
Yahoo/Broadcast.com found at:

http://www.broadcast.com/mcisp/

I see quite a few cable and dialup providers on there ( and I work for
one of 'em... )

To find out if you are viewing via unicast/multicast in Windows Media
Player, the option is View->Statistics, then in the Network section...

-Chris
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