| > I sympathize with all of your cogent comments when applied to multicasting | > in the large. However, multicasting in the small, as practiced by certain | > ISPs seems to violate all of your assumptions and thus violates your | > conclusions. A specific example is UUcast. Comments? | | There's always niche applications. Agreed. | It is still silly to build a significant chunkof complexity into the | core network just to carry insignificant amount of traffic. Ok, it's not clear to me that a niche application implies that the amount of traffic is insignificant. If UUnet decides to deliver live real-time CNN to all desktops in all of their customers, that IMHO might be significant. | PS I do not see how isolated network violates "all assumptions". For example, you assumed (implicitly) that arbitrary systems could become mcast sources. Clearly the UUnet model does not allow this. This makes the problem tractable. | And i fail to see why the same functionality (and a lot more) | couldn't be implemented in application-level host-based | caches/mcast servers. There's no particular reason to drag these | functions into core gateways. Once again, if the traffic volume is significant, there would be a significant bandwidth savings. Tony