on 7/9/2002 11:49 AM Stephen Sprunk wrote:
I think a bigger issue is that multicast is only truly compelling for high-bandwidth applications, and there's just not a critical mass of users with enough bandwidth to justify deployment today.
Multimedia is the common example but I actually find multicast more useful for common administrative services like NTP. I've also done some simple research into multicast DHCP (goodbye mandatory unicast proxies) and DNS (goodbye mandatory unicast proxies) which has looked promising for the small investigative work done. In this regard, multicasting the small chatter stuff is actually much more compelling, although these examples all apply to a local administrative scope and not to multicasting across the Internet in general. The issue with the latter is that there is no killer app which requires it. As a result, ISPs don't offer it, firewalls/NATs don't support it, and so forth. I've never had a network connection which supported it. -- Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/ Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/