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 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 (3GigaBytes) 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 3 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. If future spam blocking uses a signature system, multicast would enable this information to be distributed to all enterprise mail servers instantly and efficiently using multicast distribution... If I was implementing Maori Television and Youth Radio I would use multicast for distribution of the network transmission to reach 150 National distribution points where I would convert the multicast program for terrestrial transmission and in one step have positively changed the operational budget as well as reduced complexity of distribution. Yes I would still have to pay for each clients data charges... If I ran Correspondence School I would use multicast... If I was the TAB I would use it... I could give you 20 project scenarios that unicast can not implement in the real world. All unicast can do in every application is show the prototype concept - scale-up can not occur without multicast... This is really an Interconnect issue: customers should have network access to inject on a case by case situation... It is not up to the networks to be arbitrarily prohibiting this protocol... Please name another network protocol that could make such a difference and which is disabled ... Its like saying that the protocol extensions enabling mobile TXT messaging should have been blocked until each application was identified. I thought that Telecom, Telstra etc stopped "telling" customers what are permissible applications... Telecom and Telstra etc are supposed to implement enabling technologies which can be used by its customers who know there own current and future applications... In my professional opinion if the Boards of both these organisations understood the damage that this decision does to their clients network application capabilities, all of those executives involved would be gone. New Zealand has never had a real Internet as far as I am concerned due to this network management decision. Multicast is a broadcast service and without it the network remains unicast spaghetti, like pieces of string with empty cans of W* Baked Beans on each end... If Probe does not require multicast as a mandatory network service then the future of that service will be DOA... Due to public obfuscation of the process I don't know what they thought they required anyway. My final view on this is; turn it on and make the interconnect arrangements necessary for peering at wix and ape before one or more customers takes this to the Commissioner as an interconnect issue. Michael Sutton +64 4 4759235 www.awacs.co.nz -----Original Message----- From: Donald Neal [mailto:Donald.Neal(a)telecom.co.nz] Sent: Friday, June 27, 2003 12:41 To: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: RE: [nznog] Multicast status in New Zealand My own opinion - and I must stress that it is just my opinion - is that this will be exactly Telecom's attitude. To change the answer you'd need to change the question. If you say "Look, to provide new service X which your customers will want, you need to enable IP multicasting", that's a different issue. But that would require the identification of service X. - 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." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- _______________________________________________ Nznog mailing list Nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/nznog