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Is the MBone / Multicast Dead?

Posted by Cliff on from the lapsing-into-obscurity dept.

"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?"

2 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. Requires cooperation by Alrescha · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    ...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
  2. MBONE = Old tunneled Multicast infrastructure. by joelja · · Score: 5, Informative
    The MBONE was a tunneled infrastrucure built around a small number of layer-3 and transit exchange points such as the nasa-ames fixwest-mbone router (as10888).

    Modern multicast runs natively across and between isps that support it using PIM, MSDP, and MBGP. If anything the portions of the internet wich support interdomain ulticast are far more extensive (and more importantly robust) than they were in the tunneled era...

    a list of isp's the support multicast services for customers is at:

    http://www.multicast-isp-list.com/index2002.html