June 2003 - NZNOG - lists.nznog.org

Re: [nznog] Multicast status in New Zealand
by Ewen McNeill 26 Jun '03

26 Jun '03

In message <5.2.0.9.0.20030627141054.038683c0(a)pele.citylink.co.nz>, Richard Naylor writes: >>[Multicast] >Well the biggest part of the business is video on demand and that can >really only be unicast as getting viewers to agree on what they watch is >like agreeing on a TV Channel in a huge flat - hopeless. Even aside from the live situation you mention (eg, LOTR last year), general overseas experience with video-on-demand has shown that people really only want (to pay for) video-soon-after-demanded. Eg, for a 1-2 hour thing, having to wait, say, 2-5 minutes for it to start isn't a big deal. Even waiting 1 minute for a 10 minute thing isn't _that big a deal. Which means that for popular stuff that is "on demand" it might not be enough to have one channel with it, where the wait time is, say, 15 minutes for it to cycle around -- but it might be fine to have 10-20 channels, suitably staggered, where the wait time was 1-2 minutes. (Add channels to reduce the wait time.) Especially if there was some nice front end whereby people could find out which channel would be showing their thing starting next, and tune into that one. And it's much easier to scale channels-starting-every-minute (say) than it is to scale each-stream-is-unicast-with-its-own-start-point. (Particularly if you don't both starting/continuing the channels if there's nobody receiving it after a few minutes -- that requires some feedback outside multicast, but wouldn't be hard to do with a suitable client application and, say, UDP upstream responses every minute or so.) >back to streaming live and did the LOTR premiere last year with 10,000 >clients. Its a lot of fun and didn't really stress much other than a few ISPs. At least once some traction was made on the urgent call for more peering from the source point to the main sink points. But multicast fully deployed would definitely have helped a lot there. Ewen

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RE: [nznog] Multicast status in New Zealand
by Donald Neal 26 Jun '03

26 Jun '03

> From: Simon Lyall [mailto:simon.lyall(a)ihug.co.nz] > Sent: Thursday, 26 June 2003 17:46 > To: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz > Subject: Re: [nznog] Multicast status in New Zealand > > > On Thu, 26 Jun 2003, Craig Whitmore wrote: > > But wihtout having a killer ap or connections which can use > > them (like Telecom looking into enabling then DialIP/IPNET/Jetstream > > Network) 99% of the peopel conencted on these mediums won't > see anything) > > I'm sure there would be a few people that would jump through > the hoops to > get a non-commercial broadcast arrangement with APRA ( I > think one person > on this list has something along these lines) if they could multicast > their musical tastes to DSL people. Is anyone able to point me at some such people? - Donald Neal ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "This communication, including any attachments, is confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, you should not read it - please contact me immediately, destroy it, and do not copy or use any part of this communication or disclose anything about it. Thank you." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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RE: [nznog] Multicast status in New Zealand
by Donald Neal 26 Jun '03

26 Jun '03

> From: Michael Sutton [mailto:michael.sutton(a)awacs.co.nz] > Sent: Friday, 27 June 2003 14:55 > To: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz > Cc: Donald Neal > Subject: RE: [nznog] Multicast status in New Zealand > > > Over 500 clients of Xtra voluntarily registered and received > Radio New Zealand and BBC World Live as Multicast on Telecoms > dial up service for 3 years from 1998. > > I attended and observed when Telecom engineers enabled the > same service via adsl in Wellington as multicast sourced from > my servers in Akl in 2000. > > If [...] What I'm looking for is someone who has _today_ content which they want to distribute where a) the availability of IP multicasting could reasonably be expected to make some difference to customer experience/network load, and b) the level of demand for this content can reasonably be expected to be such that either extra revenue for someone would come from making that content available OR its availability can reasonably be expected to increase the uptake of broadband service. The first of these is actually a harder test than it looks, given that there are other ways of doing point to multipoint comunication than unvarnished IP unicast or multicast. (The classic way to allow download of big documents many times is with proxy caching, to take just one example.) - Donald Neal All opinions my own. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "This communication, including any attachments, is confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, you should not read it - please contact me immediately, destroy it, and do not copy or use any part of this communication or disclose anything about it. Thank you." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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RE: [nznog] Multicast status in New Zealand <<< CORRECTION >>>
by Michael Sutton 26 Jun '03

26 Jun '03

Correction to my earlier post: Para 3 Please read 30 gigabytes in 60 minutes. I wrote 3 gigabytes... M -----Original Message----- From: Michael Sutton [mailto:michael.sutton(a)awacs.co.nz] Sent: Friday, June 27, 2003 02:55 To: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: RE: [nznog] Multicast status in New Zealand <snip> If i was in the Ministry of Health and needed to distribute 3,000 * 10m bytes PDF document from my source server to all distribution points within 60 minutes (30 GigaBytes) no New Zealand network can do it. The distribution server and network would fail. If I used multicast and have a 256kbit multicast injection source the upload to all 3000 GPs will be complete in less than 10 minutes. The clients will still be billed for 30 gigabytes if they were being changed for local traffic and the rest of the national network would remain stable, especially for servers colocated with the originating server. <snip>

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Sobig.MM infected users?
by Neil Gardner 26 Jun '03

26 Jun '03

Hi guys, (specifially those at IHUG) any chance someone can do something about this user on IHUGs ADSL system? - (203-118-165-45.adsl.ihug.co.nz) This post is in desperation after the correct procedure for reporting this was followed twice with IHUG and no-one did anything about it except send a request for the full email which was given, and then sent me back a totally blank reply. IHUGs Helpdesk were apologetic, but said that no-one could do anything about it except between the hours of midnight and 8am (!!!!) Anyway, it wouldn't normally be an urgent issue, but the poor sucker that's infected has just subscribed to about 5 more lists that I'm on, as well as a lot of not so IT literate users, so he's going to catch a few of them... As an aside, what do most ISPs do if they find someone is infected and is sending out stuff lke this? (Yes, those dates in the email below are old - that's from the first bunch of emails he sent out when I first complained - and yes, I have checked the IP is still the same as of about 20 minutes ago) Cheers - Neil G > Return-Path: <big(a)boss.com> > Delivered-To: moderator for ultimate(a)nzfda.org.nz > Received: (qmail 32200 invoked from network); 18 Jun 2003 19:47:03 > -0000 > Received: from 203-118-165-45.adsl.ihug.co.nz (HELO MCNEILLJ-JLG772) > (203.118.165.45) > by 202-0-37-249.cable.paradise.net.nz with SMTP; 18 Jun 2003 19:47:03 > -0000 > From: <big(a)boss.com> > To: <ultimate(a)nzfda.org.nz> > Subject: Re: Movies > Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 7:47:09 +1200 > Importance: Normal > X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000 > X-MSMail-Priority: Normal > X-Priority: 3 (Normal) > MIME-Version: 1.0 > Content-Type: multipart/mixed; > boundary="CSmtpMsgPart123X456_000_0001EFBA"

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Sobig.MM infected users?
by nznog＠neilnz.com 26 Jun '03

26 Jun '03

Hi guys, (specifially those at IHUG) any chance someone can do something about this user on IHUGs ADSL system? - (203-118-165-45.adsl.ihug.co.nz) This post is in desperation after the correct procedure for reporting this was followed twice with IHUG and no-one did anything about it except send a request for the full email which was given, and then sent me back a totally blank reply. IHUGs Helpdesk were apologetic, but said that no-one could do anything about it except between the hours of midnight and 8am (!!!!) Anyway, it wouldn't normally be an urgent issue, but the poor sucker that's infected has just subscribed to about 5 more lists that I'm on, as well as a lot of not so IT literate users, so he's going to catch a few of them... As an aside, what do most ISPs do if they find someone is infected and is sending out stuff lke this? (Yes, those dates in the email below are old - that's from the first bunch of emails he sent out when I first complained - and yes, I have checked the IP is still the same as of about 20 minutes ago) Cheers - Neil G > Return-Path: <big(a)boss.com> > Delivered-To: moderator for ultimate(a)nzfda.org.nz > Received: (qmail 32200 invoked from network); 18 Jun 2003 19:47:03 > -0000 > Received: from 203-118-165-45.adsl.ihug.co.nz (HELO MCNEILLJ-JLG772) > (203.118.165.45) > by 202-0-37-249.cable.paradise.net.nz with SMTP; 18 Jun 2003 19:47:03 > -0000 > From: <big(a)boss.com> > To: <ultimate(a)nzfda.org.nz> > Subject: Re: Movies > Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 7:47:09 +1200 > Importance: Normal > X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000 > X-MSMail-Priority: Normal > X-Priority: 3 (Normal) > MIME-Version: 1.0 > Content-Type: multipart/mixed; > boundary="CSmtpMsgPart123X456_000_0001EFBA"

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Multicast status in New Zealand
by Cameron Kerr 26 Jun '03

26 Jun '03

Hello, I work as a teaching fellow in Telecommunications, teaching small-time network management and network programming. I am currently trying to learn more about multicast (IPv4 now, v6 later), in preparation for teaching multicast programming half way through the second semester. However, in the course we won't be connected to the internet, so I'm using my own home network to advance my understanding. I have a few questions about the current state of affairs wrt ISPs and content in New Zealand. 1) What broadband (and dial-up, for completeness) ISPs are multicast capable/friendly? Particularly Orcon, since our flat has just moved there. 2) What is needed to activate it at the users end (anything they need to do with mbone etc), or does the ISP deal with that? 3) Is there much in the way of content available? 4) Are there issues with NAT??? (I have a Nokia M1122 doing NAT, with Linux router/firewall behind it) Or alternatively, is there any documentation that answers these questions in the New Zealand environment. (If not, I'd be willing to help write/test.) Thank you all. -- Cameron Kerr cameron.kerr(a)paradise.net.nz : http://nzgeeks.org/cameron/ Empowered by Perl!

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Re: [nznog] Multicast status in New Zealand
by Richard Naylor 26 Jun '03

26 Jun '03

At 01:48 p.m. 27/06/2003 +1200, David Robb wrote: <snip> >Overseas content proved to be largely boring, lossy, and not worth getting >back when I played with it at ihug. Now this might have changed since >then, but I suspect that locally generated content is still the way to go. I used to be able to get a copyright clearance out of TVNZ for streaming provided I had a minder present. That stopped some years ago. So now I create my own content. Its still boring, but thats the subject matter. I get round the lossy issues with bandwidth and better codecs. Its a very niche business but I make money. More in the talk at Uniforum. > > Then you have to get it to the users,(The hard part). Customers would have > > to run Tunnels to the ISP (as Telecom Jetstream/Jetstart/Dialup) network > >Running many tunnels defeats some of the purpose of multicast, since >you're then back to multiple streams through the core of your network. >Unless of course you can distribute the tunnel endpoints out to close to >your customers, but then you may as well just use unicast and relay it. Well the biggest part of the business is video on demand and that can really only be unicast as getting viewers to agree on what they watch is like agreeing on a TV Channel in a huge flat - hopeless. But I have gone back to streaming live and did the LOTR premiere last year with 10,000 clients. Its a lot of fun and didn't really stress much other than a few ISPs. The streaming business generally just uses unicast as getting network wide multicast is impossible. HOWEVER, Access Grids require multicast and will be running shortly (Cpus arrive monday). But I will tunnel the multicast to try and have a quiet life. Tunnels are the easy way out. The Mbone tools haven't kept up with codec development and aren't great quality. On the other hand divx/mp4 gives dvd quality at 800kbps which isn't hard to deliver. I've even got 300kbyte files going onto cell phones with very good feedback. Codecs certainly have got better. So my input is that the market (ie the viewers) want VOD and that doesn't need multicast. rich

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Re: [nznog] Multicast status in New Zealand
by Nathan Ward 26 Jun '03

26 Jun '03

> This the thing that I find hard to understand. Multicast to me seems like > a cost reduction strategy rather than a revenue improvement one.....Does > no one want to reduce costs? Or is the easier path to profit through > increased revenue.... Sure, it reduces costs, but, who pays to get the content in? The ISP. How do they pass that cost on to thier customers fairly? IMO the only way to fairly do it is to watch your IGMP and see who is listening to what, and devide the costs up nicely. However, the cost per customer will differ per stream and also per minute. Did I mention the fact that you now have to account per multicast group and keep track of IGMP on all your routers... And what about in NZ where we have one or 2 main ISPs, and many smaller ISPs hanging off them. The cost that the smaller ISP gets charged by the larger ISP changes all the time now too... as a smaller ISP, try factor that into your billing system. Nathan Ward

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Re: [nznog] Multicast status in New Zealand
by Jamie Baddeley 26 Jun '03

26 Jun '03

"..I remember at uniforum it was mentioned that the hold up on multicast in NZ (read: Telecom ADSL and the like), was that it was hard to charge for.." This the thing that I find hard to understand. Multicast to me seems like a cost reduction strategy rather than a revenue improvement one.....Does no one want to reduce costs? Or is the easier path to profit through increased revenue.... sigh. jamie >>> Nathan Ward <nward(a)esphion.com> 06/27 12:45 PM >>> On Fri, 27 Jun 2003 12:22:49 +1200, Cameron Kerr <cameron.kerr(a)paradise.net.nz> wrote: > Judging by the responses I recieved, I'm led to believe that no ISPs > currently support multicast. > > I'm forced then to consider the MBone. However there is very little in > the way of instructions for connecting to the mbone (all the > instructions say is to start mrouted). However, where does the other > endpoint for the tunnel go? Is anyone here attached to the MBone? Are > there any places you can connect to (preferably in NZ) for free? > > I'm starting to think that IPv4 multicast will never come, instead, the > first public offering of multicast capabilities to the general public > will come with IPv6. Afterall, the corporate attitude is the same > towards the two technologies is the same (No-one uses it, so we won't > provide it). Is this a reasonable conclusion do you think? > > Thanks for your answers. DISCLAIMER: This email is what I recall, it may be completely incorrect "The mbone is dead" - Greg Shepherd, Uniforum 2002. The mbone was a test network. What is left of it now is more of an informal thing. Lots of people use multicast internally. I remember at uniforum it was mentioned that the hold up on multicast in NZ (read: Telecom ADSL and the like), was that it was hard to charge for. -- Nathan Ward Esphion Ltd. _______________________________________________ Nznog mailing list Nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/nznog

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