Real Media and M-Bone feeds

Tue Oct 5 19:40:22 UTC 1999

Jared Mauch <jared at puck.nether.net> wrote:

> The problem is that everyone thinks that multicasting is
> more complicated than it really is.

The problem is, everyone thinks that million lemmings can't be wrong.

Multicasting cannot be made scalable.  It is as simple as that.
One can play with multicast routing protocols as much as one
wishes - in pilots and small networks.  It only takes a question -
"ok, how are we going to handle 100000 multicast channels?" to
realize that L3 multicasting is not going anywhere as a real-world
production service.

Yes, there are better multicasting schemes (like EXPRESS from Stanford,
or even more scalable multicasting I described some time ago in TRAP
documents).  Still, they are not enough.

> People try and overthink a few too many things, and this I
> think is one.

Nah.  It is a clear and present case of not thinking hard enough.

> Worse yet, it distracts from deployment of the real solution - cacheing.

> Multicasting is faster than disk.

This is a rather strange statement.  I worked on a product (which was
shipped) which delivered something like 20Gb/s of streaming video content
from disk drives.   RAID can be very fast :)

> I'm not sure how caching
> is the solution.  Distributed content is also good.

Ah, distributed content :)  Yet another kludge requiring lots of maintenance
and "special" relatioships between content providers and ISPs.

--vadim