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Multicasting Momentum Mounts IP Multicast gains favor for multimedia delivery on Net By Larry Lange Boston --Internet service providers look for ways to deliver multimedia over the Net are increasingly turning to a five-year-old technology: IP Multicast. A number of organizations are already using it to support real-time videoconferencing, information delivery and broadcasting, and many others are taking a serious look at the technology. The Bank of Boston and NASA are both using multicasting in intranets and offer "some deployment at the wide-area level," said Brian Hill, research director for Collaborative Research. The bank uses IP Multicast on its trading floor, he said. "They get tremendous volumes of information from all the exchanges, and they have to distribute it to specific groups of traders," Hill said. "And it has to happen fast." NASA can now support videoconferencing on its intranet, and IP Multicasting has considerable potential at the agency, Hill said. "They are already using it for file transfer, updating virus libraries and huge databases and real-time collaboration," he said. Interest in IP Multicast usage is evidenced by the IP Multicast Initiative (IPMI), which now counts more than 70 Internet and intranet product vendors, network service providers and broadcast content providers as members, including Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corp. and Xerox PARC. An IPMI spin-off called the Internet Transition Working Group was formed at an IPMI meeting in June with the aim of accelerating IP Multicast deployment on the Internet. IP Multicast was adopted in 1992 by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for building multicast applications on the Internet. It runs on Mbone, the virtual Internet backbone for multicast IP that serves as the international testbed for multicast applications. The standard transmission service on the Internet is unicast, or point-to-point service. But to accommodate multimedia for collaborative work, a multicast, or one-to-many, service is desirable. IP Multicast-based routing helps distributed applications achieve fast communications over networks through IP Multicast routers, which distribute and replicate the multicast data stream to its various destinations. An estimated 3,000 interconnected networks on the Internet make up the Mbone today, and many of the major backbone providers offer some level of Mbone connectivity, according to Martin Hall, cochairman of the IPMI. But most of it goes unsupported, Hall said. "ISPs are asking, 'What is the value-add for me to turn on IP Multicast?' What we're showing them is audio/visual streaming, push applications, electronic software distribution, international player games and multipoint conferencing," he said. Hall has seen a pattern of growth for the initiative. "It's clearly easier to turn multicast on in a smaller or more-controlled network, such as an intranet. We anticipate the progression to be intranet, to extranet, followed by the Internet. But IP Multicast is not without its problems, and many ISPs are busy enough keeping their network afloat, Hall said. "They just do not have the resources to invest in planning new technology," he said. And the focus on intranets may not be the way to go for the IPMI, said Kathey Hale, Internet industry analyst at Dataquest Inc. (San Mateo, Calif.). "ISPs right now have pretty much turned themselves to focus on business customers, and the real obvious dead-center hit for multicast is multimedia delivered to the home," she said. "There's only so much need for broadcast with intranets, so they're going to have to get a bit more imaginative about that." Nevertheless. ISPs should "turn on to IP multicast," Hall said. "Those who do not will be left in the dust." (Next article.)
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