Does Your Uplink Multicast?

knof asks: "It seems like the big ISPs want to waste bandwidth, because they don't support technologies like multicast, at least here in Germany. As far as I know the only way to get multicast access is to setup a feed to the MBone or to use the DFN (Deutsches ForschungsNetz) if you're a student, which I am not. Is it expensive or difficult for ISPs to make their networks multicast aware? How is the situation in other countries? And are there any ISPs in Germany which are Multicast friendly?" It would be interesting to know how much of the Internet is capable of multicasting. Even here in the US, I don't believe it's getting widely used. Is this changing?

Comments

Multicast

[Tuzanor]

over the internet, multicast is a pretty much a useless feature. A lot of the time it won't even work because a lot of routers have been configured to ignore multicast addresses to save space on the routing tables. If only early on they knew that streaming video/audio was coming...

Considering how many IPs are wasted for multicast, its really no wonder why we're at a shortage right now. Whoever sorted the current IP space needs to be shot in the HEAD (so that his brain may NEVER be brought back). 16 million IPs for loopback? excuse me? out of that whole block the only one that gets any use is 127.0.0.1

Those Class D and E spaces could have given us many usefull IPs...and now...useless.

For all of us who are Multicast illiterate

[Mustang Matt]

A quick search on google revealed this great article!

Multicast Explanation