At 10:20 a.m. 11/03/2003 +1300, J S Russell wrote:
On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, David Robb wrote:
Anyone else out there still interested, or does everyone have enough national bandwidth these days that they don't see it as an issue?
National bandwidth is plentiful _now_, but once there's significant point-to-multipoint content out there (that the public can freely access, and _does_ freely access) all those nice 100(0)Mbits/sec peering links are going to fill. Fast.
Multicast definitely has a place in the content-delivery market.
(sorry to use your comment as the reply JSR - not picking on you) A couple of comments from the mail on the subject, For the last few events I've streamed, I have added higher and higher bandwidth streams to see who watches. Interesting. In Nov 2002 I did a 56k and 128k in Wgtn during the business day. Consistently we had twice as many 128k viewers as 56k viewers. The subject was genetic tinkering, hosted by Te Papa. Dec 2002 - LOTR street event. We ran 56k, 128k and 384k - we had equal numbers on all 3 streams. Yes 100+ viewers at 384k. I'm not sure if this reflects the availability of bandwidth in Wn, but we do know that a big screen at the Viaduct in AKL was showing the 384k LOTR stream. The 384 LOTR stream tapered off after 5pm and the 56k one picked up about 30 minutes after. I guess people went home........ We have stress tested our servers with a simulator and can serve 1500+ users at 384k. The servers are on GbE and the router can do close to that. A second server will be on APE as soon as I get left alone long enough. So we can serve a creditable viewer base on today's networks. But the big unknown market is the video on demand. - We have this going as well and it shifts serious amounts of data. I had to shift the servers when my I$P changed their national traffic charges. Multicasting doesn't help VOD out at all. But the coolest multicast stuff is the access grid. THats one of the few applications where multicast rules. But we have none in NZ yet.......... rich