[ih] Wide Area Multicast deployment [was IPv8...]

[Miles Fidelman]

Seems to me that an important potential use of multicast is gaming.

SIMNET & DIS are based on multicast.  MaK's HLA stack basically builds a multicast overlay on top of tcp (I spent a few years at MaK).

And then there are things like bit torrent and IPFS.

There's definitely a use for mutlicast, and it would help a lot if it were baked into the infrastructure.

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________________________________
From: Internet-history <internet-history-bounces at elists.isoc.org> on behalf of Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2026 5:07:01 PM
To: John Kristoff <jtk at dataplane.org>; internet-history at elists.isoc.org <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
Subject: [ih] Wide Area Multicast deployment [was IPv8...]

I have changed the Subject to match the subject.
On 22-Apr-26 08:18, John Kristoff via Internet-history wrote:
> On Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:04:28 -0700
> Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
> wrote:
>
>> 1) IP-level multicast (perhaps no longer in use or supported by the
>> IP infrastructure?  But if so, was it deemed too difficult, or just a
>> case of lost interest?)
>
> In my view, at least for inter-domain IP multicast, it was deemed too
> difficult and ultimately not worthwhile given the alternatives.

It was not only difficult and resource-heavy, but it also turned out to
be useless. Once broadband capacity to the customer became affordable,
the demand was there but it wasn't for simultaneous transmission to
many recipients, it was for individual audio or video *on demand* to
subscribers.

So that what was happened, and then we got content distribution networks,
buffer bloat, RTCWEB, and so on.

Multicast has its niches, but not in wide area networks.

"Zoom uses multicast for specific, localized purposes, primarily for
Zoom Mesh to reduce bandwidth consumption on enterprise networks."
says Google.

>
> One big challenge I think too often overlooked is the security risks
> the model presented. It can be summarized this way: without a lot of
> complex mitigation, local or remote hosts end hosts can instantiate
> state entries in network bridges/switches and routers.  To avoid a
> variety of (D)DoS threats, lots of imperfect and hard-to-manage limits,
> filters, and config options needed to be set.

Whereas unicast streaming or RTCWEB relies on a user login process.

     Brian

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