[ih] ARPANET pioneer Jack Haverty says the internet was never finished

[Michael Grant]

Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> IMHO, many things also happen for non-technical and non-business
> reasons.  Since multicast was needed for some uses of the 'net, but it
> didn't actually get deployed widely in the Internet (whatever happened
> to the Mbone...?), people figured out another way to provide it by
> putting it in separate boxes (the CDNs) from the switches themselves.

From my memory, there were several different ways of doing multicast
and it was a bit of a mess.  IGMP, PIM, others, I'm sure someone can
enumerate them all.  Almost no ISP supported multicast and the few
that did, not all were the same and very few routers supported it.

Then there was the issue that it wasn't global.  You couldn't expect
just to get something multicast to you from anywhere on the internet.

The address space (224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255) was very small, I
never understood how that was supposed to work in a global context.

You could sort of get it working within a LAN but there was no reason
to save the bandwidth with switches everywhere.

But technical stuff aside, the final nail in the coffin was that the
content providers wanted to know who they were broadcasting to so they
could advertize to them and get their data and sell it.  Also to be
able to sell the content behind a paywall.

And then there's content on demand vs live streaming.  You can't pause
a multicast stream indefinitely.

In the end, trying to save bandwidth using multicasting became harder
than just using unicast.

Michael Grant
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