All things related to multicast

["Zenon Mousmoulas" <>]

Dear all,

It's encouraging to see that AMT is gaining momentum, bringing renewed 
interest to IP multicast. However, in the interest of moving forward, and 
especially if we are to consider AMT deployment, I think there are some 
practical questions that beg for (public) answers:

a) AMT implementations:
- Juniper supports AMT relay (only) from 10.3 (maybe 10.2?). However the 
implementation doesn't seem complete, e.g. it doesn't support ipv6 or mcast 
sources on AMT gateways (I'm not sure there would be much use for the 
latter). JUNOSe support perhaps would make sense for pushing AMT relays 
closer to broadband users (in existing/legacy deployments).
- I remember Cisco being mentioned for supporting (funding) the UTDallas 
implementation, but I have yet to see any products featuring AMT. Are we 
missing something?
- Other vendors?
- What about AMT (gateway) implementations on residential gateways?
- How about native OS support? I remember reading[1] about possible conflicts 
between AMT and host IGMP/MLD stacks, e.g. where there was native multicast 
connectivity and AMT should back off, or where an IGMP v2 downgrade affected 
AMT functionality. A natively integrated stack would supposedly be able to 
better handle such cases.
- The UTDallas implementation seems frozen around 2008. The web site and 
documentation are somewhat terse; it would be nice to know at least whether 
it is still functional and how far it is from the current AMT draft.
- Are there any other (public) host-based implementations?
- Regarding Octoshape: Is there any public technical information (perhaps a 
paper) about if/when and how they use AMT?

b) AMT specs and deployment:
- What is the status of AMT anycast address space? I remember something about 
ISC and 154.17.0.0/16, but that seems long gone now. So the question is: Is 
there a well known AMT anycast relay address and prefix?
- Would anyone care to update us on the status of the AMT I-D (sorry, I 
haven't been following MBONED)? Version 10 of the draft has expired, I think. 
It would be nice to know what we can look forward to.
- There is a parallel between AMT and 6to4, both being anycast-nased 
services. In theory, with 6to4 being a transition mechanism, one expects to 
be able to reach (potentially) the global ipv6 internet or the dual stack 
ipv4/ipv6 internet. Should there be similar expectations if AMT was deployed 
like 6to4? Would large providers deploying AMT actually connect you to what 
we have come to consider the multicast internet? Maybe not a technical 
requirement, yet it is a valid concern, I think.

Best regards,
Zenon Mousmoulas
GRNET

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/76/slides/mboned-0.ppt