On Tue, 3 Sep 2019 at 10:18, Neil J. McRae <[email protected]> wrote: > > Multicast has saved us hundreds of millions of pounds in delivering lTV
Who watches ITV :) > which is still a substantially huge amount of traffic. In definitive terms yes you can say hundreds of millions of pounds or terabits of traffic, but what about relative terms? What relative percentage of traffic and OPEX has it saved you across your core? I'm didn't say it can't be done or that there aren't any benefits, but things are never simple. E.g. if you ingest content from ITV via unicast or multicast and multicast it to you STBs, the cost of the ingestion, distribution across the network, multicast enabled BNGs, CPEs, STBs, multicast trained staff, NOC, reporting and analytics, all needs to cost less than the cost of plonking the required number ITV caches around the network (because you have many other unicast caches around the place, this isn't anything new operationally). If the multicast solution is marginally cheaper you probably don't go for it, but if it's way cheaper, now you have to open the jar labelled "should we have two different solutions in operation simultaneously [multicast ITV plus unicast whatever] to save $mega_bucks or pay the extra to only have unicast services and reduced complexity"? > The complexity is minimal Agree to disagree then, finding good multicast people is hard. There also aren't many good multicast enabled NMS's. > The question that’s hard to answer is when does linear die? Too many of the > current content providers are tied to linear and will be for some time and > with the direction of freeing up radio spectrum multicast will have a huge > part in solving that problem. But with IPv6 people are looking at mad ideas like assigning IPs directly content, so multicast could be further sidelined with anycast. I won't be at UKNOF44 but I'm keen to talk more about this face to face, UKNOF45 it shall have to be. Cheers, James.
