Subject: Re: Was: "interesting" apps needed for MBone? (long)

From: Dave Hayes <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 08 Feb 1997 11:17:00 -0800

> No content --> no revenue --> no upgrades.

I'd love to provide lots more content. I'm completely set up to
provide reasonable live music content over the MBONE. However, 
three things stand in my way:

1) The amazing amount of non-content traffic generated by what people
call "routing bogons". I get these >384K pulses (gee, greater than my
frame relay CIR) that last for several minutes.  Obviously, this shuts
down this ISP for that time.  I'm no MBONE protocol guru, but I'd like
to understand why this can't be fixed within some small time radius
around this instant.

2) The low sound quality of the most ubiquitous audio tool. AM radio
quality is fine for speech, but music is another matter. Is there
a protocol standard for compressed CD-quality audio yet? 

3) The lack of a large enough audience to convince "big name" players
that it's worth the time to play here. The MBONE simply does not
command enough "market share" to have any draw to the more popular
artists. This may be a good thing, in the context of being able to
hear unknown, fresh, and talented bands...but that doesn't provide
any economic incentive to the artists. 

All comments welcome. I'd really like this to work.
------
Dave Hayes - Altadena CA, USA - [email-masked] 
Freedom Knight of Usenet - http://www.jetcafe.org/~dave/usenet

To test that which has been tested is ignorance.
      To try to test something without the means of testing is even worse

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From: Henning Schulzrinne <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 08 Feb 1997 17:31:54 -0500

An interesting model for commercial Mbone radio: www.netcast.com

This also makes use of the "Mbone islands" approach mentioned, in that
you just deploy it, say, on a suitably wired college campus. If your
target audience is the college demographics, this may be viable
technically and commercially. (It seems like most campuses have their
dorms wired for Ethernet these days.)

Henning
-- 
Henning Schulzrinne         email: [email-masked]
Dept. of Computer Science   phone: +1 212 939-7042
Columbia University         fax:   +1 212 666-0140
New York, NY 10027          URL:   http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs

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From: Petri Helenius <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 9 Feb 1997 12:09:50 +0200 (EET)

> to understand why this can't be fixed within some small time radius
Is this MBone routing traffic or something else? If it's MBone, change
your multicast routing protocol to something that does not do
this. PIM sparse mode is a good choice, our favourite around here,
overhead traffic is minimal.
We also bootstrap the RP selection using a mechanism called 'Auto-RP'
so we don't have to do manual configuration in excess of switching
multicast routing on on the selected interface.

 > a protocol standard for compressed CD-quality audio yet? 
There is. RFC2038 for example. There is also a horde of proprietary
encapsulations doing the same thing in the interim. Most of them are
shooting for standard-based transport though, but now since they are
distributing the decodecs for free and servers for $$$$, a standard
would be counterproductive to their revenues.

 > any economic incentive to the artists. 
This is the classic chicken and egg problem.
However, the pop radio station transmitting from Finland has been very
pleased with the listener figures and they decided to go on.
However, another radio station that played 'older' music cut the net
feed off since they didn't catch that many people. Maybe that's a
problem with the net community :-)

Pete

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From: Petri Helenius <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 9 Feb 1997 12:26:54 +0200 (EET)

> dorms wired for Ethernet these days.)
Excuse me, but what does www.netcast.com and IP multicast which the
MBone runs have in common?

Pete