All things related to multicast

[Gary Parker <>]

On 22 Feb 2013, at 11:51, Steven Wallace 
<>
 wrote:

> I had no idea multicast was being used for usenet. That's cool. Still, I 
> suspect the bit rate for usenet is way south of 3Gb/s. 

Sorry Steve, I didn't make myself clear. Usenet doesn't, afaik, use 
multicast. What I was getting at is that, end-to-end, nntp doesn't guarantee 
delivery of data from the poster to the reader, so the poster can employ FEC 
in the form of PAR2 chunks to ensure that the reader can recreate any missing 
blocks of data that didn't get through to their local usenet node. I see the 
same method being potentially useful when you can't guarantee delivery of 
data via UDP for large datasets over multicast.

Having read the wikipedia article I posted the link to, though, it may appear 
that the current iteration of PAR2 may not be suitable for the volume of data 
being discussed here. I'm sure there are similar technologies available that 
scale better, though.

Gary