All things related to multicast

[Alan Crosswell <>]

Mike,

It's next to impossible to get people to change their habits.  They go
to the CNN web site.  When that doesn't work, they go to the NYTimes or
other web sites to get the streams.  We did internally share our VLC
instructions among about 300 IT staff.  Still, many of them later told
me they went to the CNN site.  We did use multicast for several
congregation areas where we had large screen projection set up.

We need to get the content providers to get with the program and realize
how much money multicast can save them.  Many of the tools out there
(Microsoft and Real players for example) will try multicast and then
fall back to unicast.   They of course won't do that until access
providers offer multicast to their customers and since many of the
access providers are also content providers, they look at multicast as a
threat to their revenue.  And then there's the content distribution
networks whose revenue is based on the lack of multicast deployment.....

/a



Mike Carey wrote:
> Just curious - did you engage in any public information to encourage
> people to use the Multicast option that was available?
>
> I ask because I think we had the same issue here.  Multicast traffic
> increased above the norm, but it was unicast traffic that was really
> took off that day.  But besides the IT folks, I don't know that anyone
> knew that Multicast over I2 was the preferred method to access this
> media.  We didn't send any media blitz to the campus newspaper, Blog
> postings, or updates on Departmental websites (that I know of).
>
> So if anyone took proactive steps to encourage the user community to use
> Multicast in this situation, please share.
>
>
> Michael D. Carey
> Telecommunications and Networking Services
> Information Technology Services
> Pennsylvania State University
> (814) 863-7712
> 
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ryan Harden 
> [mailto:]
> Sent: Friday, January 23, 2009 6:48 PM
> To: 
> 
> Cc: Julian Y. Koh; wg-multicast List
> Subject: Re: Inauguration Day Stream(s)
>
> We saw an increase of about 1Gbps or so over normal levels for that time
> of day. Almost all of it was CNN's feed. A couple other sources showed
> up in there too. We didn't have any 'pain' in any of our equipment. We
> did get some fun looking graphs though. :)
>
> Unfortunately even though we have good multicast connectivity to
> Internet2, no one used it. Our traffic characterization tools didn't
> show anything over baseline.
>
> /Ryan
>
> Bill Owens wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 04:09:53PM -0600, Julian Y. Koh wrote:
> >> Now, we had definite pains on some of our external traffic due to the
> >> Octoshape P2P streaming that CNN was employing, but luckily we
> already had
> >> our multicast traffic bypassing the equipment that was hurting.
> Otherwise
> >> life would have been not so good for us.  As it was, the pain that
> people
> >> were experiencing with the unicast streams (and I'm including the
> Octoshape
> >> streams there as well) is going to serve as a good leverage for
> publicizing
> >> the multicast-based services.
> > It would have been bitterly ironic if the all-but-unannounced P2P
> pseudo-multicast traffic had interfered with the one high-grade
> multicast feed that was available to us.
> > We saw unicast traffic peaks at almost 1.2 Gbps on our egress
> connections, with several campuses maxing out their connections, all
> attributable to Octoshape (since NYSERNet doesn't provide transit to any
> commercial streaming sources). I'm glad that the network was used, but I
> do wish that they could come up with something a bit smarter.
> > Bill.
>