All things related to multicast

[Dan Pritts <>]

I think the fundamental reasons that IPv6 turned the corner are that

a) the technology seemed to fundamentally work, based on limited deployments.

b) big players saw an actual business need (or, at least, business case justification), and pushed to make it happen. 

and maybe
c) US Government made it a mandate, which helped with (a).  I suppose this is just a special case of (b). 

Multicast hasn't yet met (a) (it can be made to work, of course, but it's not easy and is fragile), and definitely hasn't met (b) or (c). 

Haven't we heard that comcast moved to ipv6 at least partly because RFC1918 space wasn't big enough for managing their huge network?

Many small players, and some big players (amazon) haven't seen the business NEED and have been slow to deploy. 

August 17, 2016 at 3:13 PM

The history of networking suggests a tendency towards connecting more
things over time. Perhaps multicast will be the exception- thus far, it
has mostly seemed to go that way. But I would point out that it wasn't
too long ago that IPv6 faced a similiar ennui and most evidence at the
time pointed to IPv6 never taking off. However, IPv6 seems to have turned
a corner in recent years and appears to be making real strides in
deployment. For those out there who are still interested in seeing
Internet Mcast become a reality, might be worth looking at what got IPv6
over the hump. Maybe it was the fear of impending doom from those ominous
Address Exhaustion countdowns, maybe it was World IPv6 Day, maybe it was
just a few large content entities throwing their weight behind v6,
whatever it was (and I'm curious myself), perhaps there are some lessons
to be learned and applied in the case of Internet Mcast. After all, every
argument (pro and con) one could make about IPv6 is equally applicable, if
not moreso, to it's technological cousin, Internet Mcast.

--
Dan Pritts

ICPSR Computing & Network Services

University of Michigan