I'm curious what barriers are keeping multicast from being deployed at the edges. Does your upstream not support multicast connectivity, or is it an education issue in getting connected?
Well, if we go out to the consumer edge, you'll find several providers deploy technologies that have bad scaling properties with multicast. If I've understood correctly, many DSL providers do the provider end of DSL as ATM, and with no "multicast smarts" at the point where the DSL circuits actually fan out (DSLAM?). This creates duplicate traffic on the "pure ATM stretch". If the DSL provider overbooks his ATM capacity (which is apparently fairly common) compared to the number of DSL circuits he terminates, well..., it's not helping. I'm sure there are other examples of more or less actively multicast-unfriendly network technologies in this market segment. Of course, having tunnels run willy-nilly over your unicast infra- structure isn't exactly ideal either. Regards, - Håvard