All things related to multicast

["John Barlow" <>]

William Caban writes:
> I was thinking on the advantages multicast can offer when disasters
> occurs and everyone want to reach their family or see the news.

Other people have been talking about news multicast, but I will talk about
the "phone call" scenario.

> ... on Tuesday morning it was very difficult to do a phone call to
> NY but the network infrastructure was there ...
> ... to intercommunicate families simultaneously

I think the best way to set up the personal communication would be on a
one-to-one basis.  Multicast isn't the answer for me, but H.323 certainly
is.  You can get voice, video, text.  It is easy to interconnect the
existing phone system with the data system so your voice call could hop-on
the data network, and/or hop-off, or the call could be purely data network
based.  Fairly easy and people did do this on the day.

There are some interesting problems to face in this scenario, most of which
involve the carrier regulation requirements (such as tracing a phone call to
a physical location, I believe this is a requirement in the United States so
that 911 operators can provide the best assistance).

John Barlow
AARNet Pty Ltd (not-for-profit ISP for the Australian universities)