🚀 go-pugleaf

>>>>> "H" == Headbanger  <lancet@netcom.com> writes:

Hi Lance!

 H> Hello, I work for an ISP that is considering offering MBone feeds to our 
 H> customers.  After doing a little research and actually getting a feed 
 H> online, I have come to the conclusion that most if not all MBone users 
 H> are not charged for these services from their upstream provides...

 H> Does the MBone community discourage/encourage/don't care if ISPs charge 
 H> additional for this service?

I guess that you could get many answers on this one.

Traditionally things just happend without money changing hands.

Ultimately you would not see a 'feed' as direct as you would with news
or something. The ultimate goal is to drop the tunnels and use native
multicast supported with the necessary routing protocols.

Now, if you would charge extra for enabling multicast on their tap,
they would search for someone to give them a tunneled multicast feed
for free. This is not exactly what you would like to see, cause now
that traffic is traversing your network in a possibly not so neat way.
If you see a lot of this you could even end up having virtually the
same traffic multiple times over the same link. This would eat up
bandwidth that your other customers could be using. With the current
load of a Mbone feed this might not be a great problem, but when more
and fatter channels is becomming more common you might see that you
are upgrading your links earlier than you would otherwise.

So, it may not be such a great thing to charge, at least not much.

BTW. A similar discussion can done on resource reservation.

I would not look on multicast as yeat another great service to take in
great money (such as in Video, No Demand) but rather as a smarter way
to do networking for some applications and thus keeping the company in
shape to be competive.

Also, look on trends... things like Linux is passed around for free,
yeat people can make good money on it by using it. Sure, you pay a few
USD for the CD, but this is handling cost as compared to other OSes.

I think that my personal preference is clear by now...

Cheers,
Magnus