David Meyer <dmm@sprint.net> writes:
Here's my $0.02 on the whole multicast thing. We've been at this for a number of years now, and robust, ubiquitous multicast on the internet is really nowhere in sight.
1. The problems that multicast solves are also solved by the favorite solution of business: buy your way out of the problem. Bigger fatter pipes. More bandwidth. Beefier routers. The problems have been addressed (papered over) by an alternate -easily implementable- but not superior algorithm.
Kind of sounds like QoS, and maybe there's a lesson there (20 years of research and IETF activity, yielding, well, what?).
2. The problems that Qos solves are also solved by the favorite solution of business: buy your way out of the problem.
Given the amount of time and resource we've spent on multicast, the question one might ask is "why hasn't multicast succeeded"?
goto 1. recurse. I do think, however, that we've all gotten it quite wrong since the beginning. Multicast is not a subset of IP. It is IP. With a different view of the protocol, unicast IP is a multicast group of 2. Broadcast is a multicast group of all... perhaps if the infrastructure reflected that from the get-go, we wouldn't be in this situation. Peace, Petr