All things related to multicast

[Tim Chown <>]

On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 11:33:40PM -0400, Bill Owens wrote:
> 
> Abilene, DREN, CA*net 4, NYSERNet, Merit all support it here in North 
> America. In Europe nearly everybody has it, most of them native. GEANT was 
> an early adopter, but for various reasons were slow to include Embedded-RP; 
> however, that configuration is nearly complete now. I'm not sure of the 
> penetration in the Pacific Rim, although our colleagues in Japan have 
> certainly been amongst the leaders at least on their individual networks; 
> I'm not sure what their inter-backbone connectivity looks like. At this 
> point we don't have native v6 multicast from the US to Japan.
> ...
> <snip>

Hi,

Bill's comments are spot on.

Regarding deployment, we have had IPv6 multicast deployed in our campus 
enterprise more reliably and longer than IPv4 multicast, ironically, due
to poor IPv4 multicast support in our previous vendor's equipment.

We now have Cisco 3750's and 6509's, and these support IPv6 multicast
and MLD snooping.   I recall we had betas of the snooping back last summer,
and it's now in product.   And yes, it is also about host MLDv2 support,
which we have found is good for Linux and Windows Vista.   As Bill I think
said, it's ironic that OS/X doesn't have it because of Apple's actions that
led to BSD not having it (ooops!).   I'm sure this will come in due course.

Regarding flooding, our wireless LANs are an issue, that's where care is 
needed.   But that's an issue for IPv4 multicast too, where for example
the higher bandwidth BBC multicast TV trials at 4-5Mbit/s per channel.

As for deployability, it is deployable on campus.  We initially used BSD
routing but now use Cisco.  And it's deployable much wider, e.g. we recently
saw Internet2 and UK (JANET) sites access each other's IPv6 Embedded-RP
sources, thanks to Embedded-RP being turned on on the GEANT (European)
backbone.   Embedded-RP allows a provider (campus) to make multicast content
available without worrying about inter-RP issues and MSDP.   Likewise,
IPv6 SSM is working internationally.   But as I see it, it's currently
pretty much constrained to academic networks.

Our students have used IPv6 multicast to deploy new applications, e.g. our 
university radio station http://www.surgeradio.co.uk/listen/advanced.html
and also making digital TV and lectures available (http://www.zepler.tv/).
Both could be done with IPv4 multicast, but we believe the IPv6 deployment
model is more streamlined, e.g. clearer ASM scope definitions and the
option to use Embedded-RP, should SSM not be used.

Which reminds me, we should talk about scopes.  We have 8 for organisation
up to e for global.  If we have regional (MAN), national (NREN), continental
(e.g. Abilene or GEANT) and worldwide academic networks, we could agree 
to use and filter scopes a,b,c,d for those four 'boundaries', leaving 9 free
for local use.

Anyway, it is very deployable :)

-- 
Tim/::1