----- Original Message -----
From: "Simon Lockhart" <simon@slimey.org>
On Fri Apr 29, 2011 at 01:48:51PM -0400, Jay Ashworth wrote:
Will they not complain about having their equipment utilization go up with no recompense -- for something that is only of benefit to commercial customers of some other entity?
Sorry, but are your eyeballs not already paying you for that bandwidth that they are consuming. Multicast merely optimises that across your network.
You have 200,000 eyeballs all watching the royal wedding on youtube, at 2Mbps per stream.
or
You have 200,000 eyeballs all watching the royal wedding on multicast, with no more than one copy of 2Mbps going over each of your backbone links.
I know which one I'd prefer.
He's the devil, I'm just his advocate. Good. :-)
The only place it causes some confusion over charging is if you're the content ISP which is originating the multicast. How do you charge your TV Channel customer? Sure, it won't be 2Mbps at your normal per Mbps rate, but equally it won't be 2Mbps * the number of end users watching the stream. It'll be somewhere in the middle, probably tending far more towards the 2Mbps end.
Sure; people who supply lots of bandwidth to content providers *now* will probably be unhappy about this idea, but... no business is guaranteed its business model; that observation goes back at *least* to Robert Heinlein's first short story, "Lifeline" from 1954(?)... and I *think* he was quoting Supreme Court Justice Learned Hand, but haven't been able to source it. The real problem I see myself is that *the Mbone has to be pervasive* (or mostly so) for this to be a worthwhile investment for providers. Not to mention it being practical for eyeballs to *get* to it; haven't seen that HOWTO pointer yet from anyone. :-)