Michael Dillon said: The word "multicast" in the above quote, does not refer to the set of protocols called "IP multicast". Content delivery networks (CDNs) like Akamai are also, inherently, a form of multicasting. So are P2P networks like BitTorrent and EMule. That's precisely what I mean. Marshall Eubanks said: I have heard that several big mobile providers are shortly going to come out with 802.16 networks in support (I assume) of point 3 I don't know whether Sprint Nextel's big 802.16e deployment is going to be used for this, although their keenness on video/TV argues for it. A wide range of technologies are in prospect, including DMB, DAB-IP, DVB-H, Qualcomm's MediaFLO and IPWireless's TDTV. These are radio broadcast systems of various kinds - MediaFLO and TDTV are adaptations of 3G mobile technologies, from the CDMA2000 world and UMTS respectively. TDTV, the one I am most familiar with, is essentially a UMTS-TDD network with all the timeslots set to send (from the base station's viewpoint). 3GPP and 3GPP2 are standardising a Multimedia Broadcast-Multicast Subsystem as an add-on to the R99 core network, expected in 2008.
From an IP perspective, most of these are fairly orthogonal, being essentially alternative access networks on the other side of the MBMS control function.