multicast (was Re: Readiness for IPV6)

Tue Jul 9 19:32:08 UTC 2002

David Meyer <dmm at 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