On 15/12/2008, at 6:11 PM, Jasper Bryant-Greene wrote:
I'm not sure IPv6 will make multicast any more likely to actually happen. If someone thought deployment of multicast to the consumer was useful, it would already be happening - multicast goes through NATs OK in the UK, where I understand the BBC are testing delivery of content using multicast[1], and I'm pretty sure Kiwi NATs aren't functionally different from British NATs :)
The main difference is that in Britain the NAT functionality happens on rooters.
So, if I may hijack this thread slightly to ask a question: Is anyone using multicast across AS boundaries in NZ right now? If not, why not? There are several streaming media providers in NZ for whom multicast would surely save a lot of bandwidth at the source.
Some years ago (8ish), Attica or Actrix or A-something was bringing in a feed from what was then called the "m-bone" and making it available to APE (with PIM I think?). http://mbone.net.nz/ Ah, it was Attica. I had an IHUG Ethernet service over United Networks (now Vector) and was able to watch NASA TV with a whole lot of poking around with some fairly clunky apps. It was very experimental, zero support etc. As for why not, back then people were doing differentiated billing - domestic was largely "free" and international was rated (for ADSL circuits anyway). That was a bit of a problem for billing, as people were doing flow based accounting and various other things like that. That was the main problem people cited if I recall correctly. Oh, and also people having different international/domestic speeds on the one circuit, etc. As for why it doesn't happen now, why would an ISP enable multicast for a customer of theirs (ie. a streaming media provider) when they can leave it disabled and charge a much higher access fee? Show me a revenue stream for ISPs hosting the content, and I'm sure it'll get turned on. Right now I don't see any, unless there's content coming in internationally and we just have eyeballs. What applications are available for multicast? Can Flash do multicast? I think Quicktime and Windows media can, yeah? Maybe lack of skill is a problem as well. You could run a hands-on multicast workshop at NZNOG'10, perhaps. Set up a few sources and sinks, and build a multicast capable network in between :-) I'd be kinda keen to do a bit of experimenting with radio streams in some spare time, but I don't have my own APE/WIX port right now. Do you have a link on to APE/WIX with Multicast enabled in some fashion? What about internationally? Can we build a tunnel of some kind? Feel free to offlist the response to that if you want, best not have any operational content on here :-) -- Nathan Ward