I think I heard "Matt Ranney" say:
On Tue, 6 May 1997, Aleph One wrote:
Morning all. I was wondering if anyone could comment on how deployed is multicast routing in real-world networks. How many of you have enabled multicast routing in your core routers? Do you offer this as a service to
All the sites that I'm familiar with are still using tunnels. Some of those tunnels might be homed on dedicated routers instead of a Unix/mrouted machine, but I'd be somewhat surprised if anybody ran native multicast in their core routers.
People pay for unicast traffic, and its not worth messing up that unicast traffic for a fun multicast experiment that'll crash your router or run it out of memory ever other day.
I've heard of several ISPs running native multicast on their core routers since it's more efficient than using tunnels, but still using tunnels for inter-domain multicast connectivity. It seems to me that most ISPs would rather use multicast and have traffic traverse their backbone just once than use point-to-point connections for several identical data feeds. I think saying that multicast will "crash your router" might be a harsher statement than is necessary (but I'm not saying that Cisco (and other vendors) haven't had their share of screwups). PIM in later releases of the IOS hasn't inherently unstable, but of course, it must be configured properly. :) -matthew mwhalen@uucom.com Shop as usual...........................and avoid panic buying