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Re: Confirming source-routed multicast is dead on the public Internet


From: Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>
Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2018 11:27:49 -0400 (EDT)

Thanks to everyone that helped. Off-list I heard from network engineers at several global Internet providers. They all confirmed that multicast is no longer supported on their public Internet backbones, no matter what their sales people might say. If someone opened a multicast trouble ticket, likely no one in their NOC would know what to do with it. They acknowledged there might be some old multicast configs on Internet facing routers, and eventually they'll clean those out.

Backbone network engineers are fairly blunt.

Multicast is being used in various private IP networks. It seems to work very well for satellite content distribution because multicast doesn't require ack's. Enterprise networks also use multicast.


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