🚀 go-pugleaf

To get back to Lance's original question:

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

It's really up to you whether you want to charge for this service or
not.  If you did decide to charge, the harder question might be to
figure out how much.  As has been expressed in the discussion
following Lance's post,

  - it's not clear how charging should work to make revenues follow
    costs.

  - it's hard for you assure some level of service on an MBone feed,
    in particular if the sender and receiver aren't both within your
    network.

But if your customers are asking for non-assured MBone service and are
willing to pay you extra for it, that's between you and them.

You may also want to explore implementation of native multicast
instead, where you are likely to be able to provide a better quality
and higher capacity service.  This can be connected to the MBone,
too, though there are some subtle issues when interworking multiple
multicast routing protocols.


As I read through this discussion, I think there has been a problem
with confusion among

  - IP multicast routing and service in general;

  - the MBone as the experimental deployment of IP multicast routing
    on a global scale;

  - a set of applications made popular on the MBone.

The are all quite distinct.  As others have said, IP multicast is
being used already and its use is critical to the wide-scale depoyment
of a number of existing and future applications.  Whether or not the
deployment of multicast in the MBone achieves the desired level of
service is not necessarily relevant (except that I think the MBone has
served to demonstrate some possibilities).  But in particular,
comparing research applications to commercial applications is not
useful because they are not intended to be competitive.

							-- Steve