There is also a "cart and horse" issue here: Where is the pervasive content? Most content providers don't want multicast because it breaks their billing model. They can't tell how many viewers they have at a given moment, what the average viewing time is, or any of the other things that unicast allows them to determine and more importantly bill their advertisers for. There is no Nielsen's Ratings for multicast so that advertisers could get a feel for how many eyeballs they are going to hit. Then add in the latest from Congress with regard to streaming audio over the net, and you have a source payment issue making you not want to go down the multicast path. (Leaving Congress living up to their name as being opposite of progress.) Multicast is a great technology. It just is stuck looking for a problem to solve that doesn't create even more problems. David -----Original Message----- From: Leo Bicknell [mailto:bicknell@ufp.org] Sent: Tuesday, July 09, 2002 7:52 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: multicast (was Re: Readiness for IPV6) In a message written on Tue, Jul 09, 2002 at 10:39:35AM -0400, Jared Mauch wrote:
They aren't aware of the savings they can see, consider the savings too small, don't know how to configure, can't configure, break the config, etc.. the list goes on and on.
Speaking from a provider who used to run multicast, and now doesn't: Customers don't want it. I can count our customer requests for multicast on both hands for the last two years. Of those, only one thought it was important, the rest were just playing with it. In fact, pretty much the only place we see it anymore is on RFP's from educational groups. My own view is that customers don't want it, because end users don't have it. Dial up users will probably never get multicast. So that leaves Cable Companies (good luck for them to do something intelligent) or DSL providers (perhaps they might) to make it happen. If a few million end users could just 'get it', then people running streaming services would be beating on backbone providers to carry it around. There is also a payment problem. If a unicast bit enters your network, you can be assured it takes one path to the destination. When a multicast bit enters your network, it could take one path, or it could take 50 paths through your network. The latter does cost the ISP more. This also makes peering an issue, as many people use ratio. If there was a significant amount of multicast traffic, hosting ISP's would send end-user ISP's one small stream that they would then replicate. That would pretty much make the ratio completely opposite of what it is today, due to unicast streaming. I'll be the first to jump on the multicast bandwagon, but I don't work for an eyeball provider. The first adopters need to be DSL and cable modem providers, to the end user, on by default. Then we can go somewhere. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/ Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org