Auto-tunnel Rant

[Marshall Eubanks <tme@21rst-century.com>]

Hello All;

  Today there was no time in the MBONED meeting to have a general
discussion of the various auto-tunneling proposals, which
was unfortunate. I will therefore inflict what I would have
said there upon on the list. I should say that I have respect for all
of the authors of these proposals, and (although I might have
specific problems with aspects of each) I have no doubt that they
could be made to work, given sufficient time and effort. My comments
are not a reflection on the technical, but instead the business, aspects
of these proposals. I also recognized that there also might be
specific applications where auto-tunneling could be useful - I am
specifically responding to the proposals to emulate SSM, which is intended
to assist broadcast.

   I think that the promotion of auto-tunnels for the purpose of
furthering multicast deployment is WRONG. It is, IMHO, NOT productive to 
expend time and effort in this direction. It diverts resources from the real goal,
which is multicast deployment. If deployed, it will cause problems that will
be inevitably be blamed on multicast. Furthermore,
I know of NO broadcaster who is requesting it. From a broadcast standpoint, 
unicast fail-over is much preferable to auto-tunnels - it is more under the 
broadcasters control, and almost certain to be cheaper - and unicast failover 
is too expensive to be easily profitable. It will also take time (6 months ? a year ? two ?) 
to implement any tunnel scheme, and I can easily see ISP's putting multicast
off to wait and see on the auto-tunnel deployment. For all of these reasons 
I sincerely hope that neither the SSM nor the MBONED group back any of these 
proposed tunnel schemes.


                                   Regards
                                   Marshall Eubanks


   Multicast Technologies, Inc.
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