How do you put a TV station on the Mbone?

Sat Apr 30 17:30:40 UTC 2011

Once upon a time, Daniel Roesen <dr at cluenet.de> said:
> That reminds me of 9/11. When the tragic event unfolded, we sat in the
> office. News made the rounds verbally, and people started looking for
> streaming services at their personal desks (no TVs around). People
> pretty quickly gave up trying to find streams and news portals which were
> actually working fine and the crowd gathering behind me watching over my
> shoulder became bigger and bigger.

We had a TV in the office then, but now we don't.  The other big news
event of the week, the tornadoes in the south (especially here in
Alabama), meant we were filling up our office bandwidth much of the day
Wednesday, watching the local weathermen to find out if we (or our
family and friends) were next.  This was an exceedingly unusual event in
terms of magnitude, but the watching to see where the tornadoes go part
is fairly regular around here this time of year.  Every time there is a
severe weather outbreak, we see our bandwidth usage go up significantly
(especially when it is during the business day).

As an admin at a small ISP, I'll admit we don't have multicast set up in
our network, in part because every time I've looked, I just end up
confused.  Kind of like IPv6 was for a long time, except IPv6 has more
attention and so more people writing better (easier to understand) info.

Of course, we provide DSL via PPPoE (wholesaler, so we don't have a
choice in the setup), so there isn't much we can do to help with that
level.  That's where we could gain the most of course; we sometimes see
nearly double the DSL traffic for big events (not for the wedding
though, since most of our customers don't have electricity).  The "last
mile" is usually the bottleneck, but that's the hardest nut to crack.

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.