On Tue, 2008-12-16 at 22:27 +1300, Simon Blake wrote:
On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 06:56:19PM +1300, Nathan Ward said:
I think there's also a perception that multicast is a solution to a diminishing problem.
Aided by CDNs and approaches such as Anycast perhaps? Once upon a time the issue was content server scaling. Geographic Distribution and anycast/cdn trickery helps with that. Quite a lot. Bigger and meaner servers also help. As do the proliferation of datacentres. Another once upon a time the issue was bandwidth to the customer. UCLL/FTTP/FTTH/FTTX/etc helps with that. Copyright does too come to think of it ;-) Once upon a time router CPU inhibited the viability of multicast. FPGA's helped that. Then it was backbone problems. Err, folks helped with that :-) Umm, what's the problem again? Seems to me Multicast is an excellent vehicle for the distribution of noise. Stuff you might want someday but are not sure. Dribble it to me over a period of time and I might check it out. Multicast I suppose is also good for convergence zealots (who are actually good folks trying to make telco business more efficient) who say that a common distribution platform is good. I'm OK with that. Anyone remember that argument around how the ALL IP network will realise lower TCO? Oh, the holey grail! (sic) Noting your reference Simon (hat tip Hamish)..Appointment TV. Hands up who wants an Internet where you have to keep to someone else's appointment to connect to stuff? Is that perhaps exactly not the point? jamie (speaking totally from a personal, non aligned perspective) [p.s back in 2000 I played around with multicast. the biggest problem was I couldn't synchronise CPU processing such that the audio/video spat out on distributed heterogeneous systems at almost exactly the same time over a wide geographic area. At that point I gave up. But it was fun playing with it.]