2

One-to-many communication over the internet is an enabling technology for many fascinating business and research projects.

In principle, IPv4 and IPv6 allow for such communication by the specification of IP multicast, see e.g. this post from 2012.

In practice, however, IP multicast has a reputation of being hampered, firstly, by many ISPs' rational decision not to route multicast traffic and, secondly, by the impossibility of reserving (purchasing) multicast IP addresses.

Hence, my questions are:

  1. Is global IP one-to-many communication practical today, such that a small company connected to an average ISP could offer such a service to the average individual internet user?

  2. Are there any operational services that constitute a proof of concept?

  3. Does anyone have first-hand experience with it or even code?

Community
  • 1
Max Flow
  • 121
  • 2
  • 1
    I believe the answer is **no**. But I don't know how to extend that into an answer with sufficient detail for this site. – kasperd Jul 31 '15 at 16:24
  • I have theorised about using NPt to map an assigned prefix to a multicast prefix, but I have never investigated if it should work, nor have I tried. – jornane Jul 31 '15 at 16:34
  • Thanks for sharing your thoughts! NPt is Network Prefix Translation as discussed in [RFC6296](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6296)? – Max Flow Jul 31 '15 at 17:37

0 Answers0