Subject: Re: bandwidth (and other support) required for multicast

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 18:41:16 -0700 (MST)

> From: "Ole J. Jacobsen" <[email-masked]>

> So, meanwhile, you would rather we NOT use widely available tools
> that allow "remote viewing" just because:
>
> - They aren't standards based
>
> - They aren't available on absolutely every platform
>
> Isn't this counter to allowing more participation?
> ...

I would have guessed that the only legitimate purposes for remote
viewing tools are related to the work of the IETF, and that "more
participation" per se is at best irrelevant.

If the IETF's solutions for remote viewing are useless, then that
is itself a more important discovery than would be obtained by any
amount of "allowing more participation."  "Eating your own dog food"
is important even for standards committees.

The first InterOp was useful and interesting, but every subsequent one
was less of either until by the mid-1990's they were quite irrlevant, pale
imitations of COMDEX.  Those results of striving for "more participation"
were not new and seem inevitable some who remember some big joint computer
conferences in previous decades.

  ...

I've been thinking about multicasting in recently.  In the 1980's and
early 1990's, I thought it was wonderful, and did a little to help support
it in commercial systems.  Today it seems to have less real use than in
1990.  I have less access to IETF multicasts now than I did in 1992.  What
is multicasting used for today besides such short-range, "infrastructure"
not-really-applications as router discovery, RIPv2, IPv6 equivalents, and
perhaps some LAN multi-play games?

It's time to accept the fact that something is very wrong.  I don't know
if the fatal flaws are in the basic idea, the routing, the greedy
shortsightedness of ISP's, or some evil conspiracy.  Regardless of why,
if it is be dead dead, it's not alive.  It's time to fix it or bury it.

Differentiated services have a similar pallor, but unlike multicasting,
there's talk of applications that people really seem to care about to get
that heart beating.  Yes, multicasting probably still has such as "video
conferencing" as killer apps, but...well, I've seen that show.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

---

From: Francis Dupont <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2001 15:53:40 +0200

In your previous mail you wrote:

=> according to some discussions with ISP technical people,
IMHO the problem is the cost in managing the routing stuff:
this cost (a large number of skilled engineers) is higher than
the turnover! But there is a good news: SSM already seems to
have got market acceptance so multicast is not yet dead...

Regards

[email-masked]