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Re: Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?

  • From: Gian Constantine
  • Date: Tue Jan 09 13:59:56 2007
The available address space for multicast in IPv4 is limited. IPv6 vastly expands this space. And here, I may have been guilty of putting the cart before the horse. Inter-AS multicast does not exist today because the motivators are not there. It is absolutely possible, but providers have to want to do it. Consumers need to see some benefit from it. Again, the benefit needs to be seen by a large market. Providers make decisions in the interest of their bottom line. A niche service is not a motivator for inter-AS multicast. If demand for variety in service provider selection grows with the proliferation of IPTV, we may see the required motivation for inter-AS multicast, which places us in a position moving to the large multicast space available in IPv6.

Gian Anthony Constantine
Senior Network Design Engineer
Earthlink, Inc.

On Jan 9, 2007, at 1:09 PM, Joe Abley wrote:


On 9-Jan-2007, at 13:04, Gian Constantine wrote:

You are correct. Today, IP multicast is limited to a few small closed networks. If we ever migrate to IPv6, this would instantly change. One of my previous assertions was the possibility of streaming video as the major motivator of IPv6 migration. Without it, video streaming to a large market, outside of multicasting in a closed network, is not scalable, and therefore, not feasible. Unicast streaming is a short-term bandwidth-hogging solution without a future at high take rates.

So you are of the opinion that inter-domain multicast doesn't exist today for technical reasons, and those technical reasons are fixed in IPv6?


Joe