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
