>hello gang:
>
>I hope some experts like Howard Berkowitz can respond:
>
>question - what is the status of multicasting on the Internet today? Both
>technically, and non-technically?
Well, my area of specialization is unicast. I don't routinely read
the multicast routing lists, but my general impression is that
intradomain multicast is indeed used with increasing frequency, but
interdomain still has major problems of billing, security, resource
impact on unwitting operators, and resource location.
>
>But now I've noticed yet another group of technologies emerging - BGMP
>(which I am told is supposed to be better than MSDP/MBGP, but I don't yet
>understand how it is better), bidirectional PIM (which seems to be another
>name for CBT), and SSM with IGMP V3 (which still leaves open the question
>that how would you know who to block and who not to block?). Plus, I seem
>to see less emphasis on CGMP, and more emphasis on RGMP and IGMP snooping.
While IEEE has a CGMP-like function being defined, doing things at
layer 3 tends to optimize multivendor interoperability. I like the
idea of CGMP myself, and I wonder if it might some day evolve to
something controlled by MPLS setup protocols.
>
>
>But the bottom line is that I still don't see too many widespread
>consumer-uses of multicasting. I only see real-world uses of multicasting
>within companies (financial information in investment companies), or, across
>the Internet, meetings of standards bodies.
>But, for example, I don't see anything like the Superbowl or the World
>Series being delivered via multicast.
Yes and no. ESPN does use multicast to deliver such content to
subscribing television stations, but not to end users.
>OK, OK, that's because of corporate
>licensing restrictions, but I think you see my point, I don't see a whole
>lot of multicasting that delivers information of interest to the average
>user.
One of the things that I personally find flawed in using multicast in
distributing video to end users is that the channels are synchronized
in time -- in other words, a given program starts at a given time,
and if you're late, you miss it. I think a VCR-like function has
more commercial appeal, where multicast is used to distribute content
to video caches at the provider edge or even in set-top boxes, but
the end user then can access the content on random-access storage.
Message Posted at:
http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=9685&t=9655
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