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

Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com
Sun Jan 7 14:48:25 UTC 2007


> Why would you want to stream in unicast when there are already 
> models for effective multicast content delivery (see Michael's 
> list)? *See point above!*

The word "multicast" in the above quote, does not refer
to the set of protocols called "IP multicast". Content
delivery networks (CDNs) like Akamai are also, inherently,
a form of multicasting. So are P2P networks like BitTorrent
and EMule. If this sounds odd to you, perhaps you don't really
understand the basics of either multicast or P2P. Check out
Wikipedia to see what I mean:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast

If your data absolutely, positively, must be delivered
simultaneously to multiple destinations, i.e. time is
of the essence, then I agree that P2P and IP multicast
are not comparable. But the context of this discussion
is not NYSE market data feeds, but entertainment video.
The use-cases for entertainment mean that timing is
of little importance. More important are things like
consistency and control.

--Michael Dillon





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