On Apr 29, 2011, at 8:46 PM, Jared Mauch wrote:

> I think this is sadly the truth.  There are some problems that can be solved 
> by multicast, but I've seen the number of customer requests for v4 multicast 
> go by the wayside over the years.  The only people that are generally 
> interested are the conference venues for technical things, e.g.: RIPE, 
> ARIN/NANOG, APRICOT, etc.  
> 
> Plus, conferences like NANOG have beamed the video back to some other site 
> for fanout as well, for both unicast and multicast.
> 
> The problems at Layer7 and below are solvable with market forces.  They're 
> all 8/9 issues, about the content providers wanting to be 
> paid-per-subscriber/viewer.  They don't want to know how few people are 
> actually tuned in at that moment in some cases.  I'm sure they want to be 
> paid some fraction of that cost that goes to your TV Transport conduit 
> provider.

I'm not at all certain that this is a political problem.  I believe it is more 
of a user need / want problem (which I guess you could classify as "layer > 7" 
if you want).

The occasional large live "event" - and when I say occasional, I mean not a few 
per year - likely could be helped if there were a magic wand to wave which made 
multicast work for no CapEx or OpEx and perfectly billed.  But the vast 
majority of traffic cannot be served by multi-cast.

The real cost of multi-cast (when it works at all!) may be too great for the 
small benefit, even ignoring the billing mechanism.

People's proclivities change.  As a vendor / supplier / company who gets paid, 
we have to adjust to the wishes of the people paying us as best we can.  Or 
someone else will.

-- 
TTFN,
patrick


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