I agree with your take on the issue, Ewen...

Further, it is surely in the "National Interest" that multicast be in active operational capability today for the "Public Internet" so that in the event of a future national crisis such as a SARS, Foot and Mouth, Small Pox or when a similar situation occurs the facility can be used to its best technical advantage. 

It is then important to: communicate, instruct & train, professionals and the public - while reducing close personnel contact.  Multicast can be used to provide "low cost" high quality content injection which of itself does not cause degradation of New Zealand network performance at any location during a strategic performance window. Alternatives such as Consumer Digital Satellite TV would cost, at list prices, significant dollars to open up spot channels for a period of days || weeks || months, and in such circumstances the  Ministries available discretionary funds would be under severe pressure, and therefore may be excluded as a viable option. However, multicast would help, as the cost of 48hours digital satellite television broadcast might equate to the cost of one years multicast distribution @ 300kbs.

During the SARs containment emergency, Beijing and other locations in China closed schools and other education institutions and made children stay home.  Their schools used telephones and the Public Internet to conduct distance learning.  What would happen in New Zealand if all schools in Auckland and other city locations closed. Multicast was also used to connect SARS support hubs in Asia.

Therefore prior to such an emergency, operational multicast services today would enable strategic content provider organisations to distribute current operational materials for capture and/or real-time display and be prepared and confident that such a system can be relied on as a front-line communication capability.

So... reliable operation today ensures access when Noah needs an Ark...  Nobody will try to implement it the day a Balloon goes UP...

Hope you are all having a great conference...  Is Joe warbling now...

Best Regards
Michael Sutton
InternetNZ  By-election Candidate - Councillor
Vote now :) (disgraceful lobby)
http://www.internetnz.co.nz/members/by-elections/030619byelection.html
http://www.internetnz.co.nz/biographies/bio03-msutton.html
-----Original Message-----
From: Ewen McNeill [mailto:ewen@naos.co.nz]
Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2003 10:06
To: Hamish MacEwan
Cc: nznog@list.waikato.ac.nz
Subject: Re: [nznog] Multicast status in New Zealand

<snip>
It does, however, seem to me rather counter productive to insist that
they must use unicast, must use the bandwidth inefficiently, in order to
some how deter this.  At best all that's likely to achieve is that
there's even less bandwidth available for other things.  (Witness
allocations of the frequency spectrum to radio, TV, etc, and what's left
for ham radio operators.)

And to make it even harder for "small operators" to join in -- so bang
goes your online equivilent of public access TV (it's just too expensive
to get a pipe big enough to unicast it to a reasoanble audience).

<snip>....

Indeed.  And that survives partly because many people "need" to be at
work at the same time, which is largely true because of network effects
(eg, you'd like the cafe to be open when you want to get morning tea,
and people need to be in the same place at the same time for meetings,
etc).

And in the same way when something "interesting" happens lots of people
are going to "need" to see it at once, if only to keep up with the Jones
and be able to talk about it at morning tea the next day. 

To use your earlier analogy providing more buses/trains/etc can help
to reduce this congestion.  And in the same way multicasting can help
reduce the congestion.  But apparently buses/trains/etc are good, and
multicasting is bad, for reasons I don't follow.