Is the MBone / Multicast Dead?

"Zow" asks: "I've been looking into a P2P web-caching scheme and noticed that Squid already has the underpinnings for this using multicast, which seems like a reasonable way to do P2P requests. Reasonable, except for the fact that all my web searches for multicast in general and the MBone in particular mostly turn up sites more than 3 years old. Even the MBone FAQ was pulled because it was so old. MBone.com now belongs to a domain squatter. So, what happened? Did everyone give up on Multicast for all practical purposes? Is everyone who was interested in multicast now working on Internet2? Is it only being used for LAN applications? What caused this loss of interest? Cheap bandwidth? Lack of applications? Lack of network support? Unforeseen technical difficulties? Is it still a viable technology for anything?"

Comments

Requires cooperation

[Alrescha]

Multicast is a delightful concept. Consider that it would make it possible for everyone in the country to watch a streaming video or listen to a music station with one and only one original stream from the source.

The traffic would be carried only by those routers who had downstream listeners, and not carried where there were none. What a delight.

What's the problem? It would require the owners of all those routers to cooperate with each other. I think that's enough to kill it right there. (Yes, there are some technical issues as well)

A.

Business models and future prospects

[Anonymous Coward]

MBone is basically an IPv4 testbed for applications which will become available to endusers with IPv6. If you're looking for multicast, look for IPv6. Multicast also does not fit in today's business models which tend to see internet providers as downstream for centralized content producers. Often even a fixed IP address is not available with consumer flat rate plans. That should give you an idea where most customers fit into ISPs' plans.

Re:I want multicast yesterday...

[Rick the Red]

there is ZERO incentive for any ISP to go IP6

Until we all run out of IPv4 addresses, then watch the stampede to implement it. Also, it will take Microsoft building IPv6 into Windows/DHCP, so the user doesn't know or care if s/he's on 4 or 6, and can move their computer between 4 and 6 without changing a thing. Yet another way to force upgrades to the latest license^h^h^h^h^h^h^h version.

Dead? Not quite

[Gruturo]

I've worked on a Mid-2001 online concert featuring the return of a very famous Italian, singer, Mina. The event was available in multicast for people connected to Italian ISPs Inwind and Libero/IOL/Infostrada (totalling around 7 - 8 million subscribers), Unicast for others. I personally configured the front-end routers with the PIM Rendez-vous point :-)

ISPs have merged, pages have changed, but by chance the concert page is still up, although it's in Italian.

Now, I'm working @ a Satellite ISP and we're streaming Multicast all the time (both windows media streams and a data-push protocol which needs no return channel (carousel + heavy FEC)).

Multicast dead?
*not quite*

I'm also about to multicast-stream TV off 802.11b at my house just to see how it works!

P.S.
By the way, I'd HAPPILY kick the last Microsoft boxes out of my server room. Does anybody know of a multicast acquisition-streaming platform which could be a drop-in replacement for Windows Media Encoders + Windows Media Server?
Must work with Windows Media Player on the other side!

Re:MBONE [NO LONGER]= Old tunneled infrastructure.

[Ross Finlayson]

Just to clarify the previous comment: While the term "MBone" originally referred to a tunneled overlay network (using the DVMRP protocol) on top of unicast, that network was obsoleted several years ago by native multicast routing.

Since then, the term "MBone" came to refer to the subset of the public Internet that is connected via IP multicast routing. (Nowadays, the multicast routing protocol that's most commonly used is PIM-SM.) So, the "MBone" still exists, although it's still not nearly as widespread as many of us would like.