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Comment by loeg | Hacker News Reader

Multicast on the internet is a nice dream. Will it actually happen with IPv6? My understanding is there is a barrier to adoption — basically all routers involved need to be aware of the multicast initiation/join/leave protocol, and basically, there's a bunch of old hardware/software out there that isn't aware. Is all IPv6-capable hardware capable of this (given that IPv6 came out in ... 1998)?

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I had the impression that the biggest hurdle for multicast to happen on the internet is the insane memory requirements for routers to track all the multicast memberships (as well as being extremely open for abuse -- imagine one client subscribing to every multicast stream out there and never leaving, that would flood the incoming pipes for that ISP)

IPv6 is also pretty much a requirement due to the whole multicast MAC address collision thing I believe.

While I don't know anything about how multicast is specified, I would certainly hope that it is possible to implement in such a way that each router only needs to track the memberships of it's direct neighbors. They would then themselves advertise that membership in order to serve their neighbor's request.

As for the abusive client, I say if the ISP has any sense of self preservation, they should be interested to police this themselves. For example, knowing how much bandwidth the client is paying for, they could refuse additional or even cut existing memberships of that client once that limit is reached.

The problem is that a router's direct neighbors may be subscribed to millions of multicast groups and nobody has enough TCAM to track those memberships.

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