Sorry I meant TV and not just ITV. > In definitive terms yes you can say hundreds of millions of pounds or > terabits of traffic, but what about relative terms? What relative > percentage of traffic and OPEX has it saved you across your core?
Not sure why you care if it’s opex or anything else. It’s saved us _hundreds of millions_ of pounds in cash, moulah, filthy lucre, spondulicks etc. > I'm didn't say it can't be done or that there aren't any benefits, but > things are never simple. E.g. if you ingest content from ITV via > unicast or multicast and multicast it to you STBs, the cost of the > ingestion, distribution across the network, multicast enabled BNGs, > CPEs, STBs, multicast trained staff, NOC, reporting and analytics, all > needs to cost less than the cost of plonking the required number ITV > caches around the network (because you have many other unicast caches > around the place, this isn't anything new operationally). If the > multicast solution is marginally cheaper you probably don't go for it, > but if it's way cheaper, now you have to open the jar labelled "should > we have two different solutions in operation simultaneously [multicast > ITV plus unicast whatever] to save $mega_bucks or pay the extra to > only have unicast services and reduced complexity"? > The cost of operating this is a piss in the ocean compared to the cash saved all of the things you talk about I already have. Multicast isn’t that difficult to learn or monitor. You need more monitoring for unicast to make sure the receiver (I.e my eyeball) is getting a picture. With multicast it’s easier to know what the experience is With dynamic multicast which is what we have at BT I can wind the needs up and down. >> The complexity is minimal > Agree to disagree then, finding good multicast people is hard. There > also aren't many good multicast enabled NMS's. > With streaming telemetry managing multicast has never been so easy. >> The question that’s hard to answer is when does linear die? Too many of the >> current content providers are tied to linear and will be for some time and >> with the direction of freeing up radio spectrum multicast will have a huge >> part in solving that problem. > > But with IPv6 people are looking at mad ideas like assigning IPs > directly content, so multicast could be further sidelined with > anycast. > > I won't be at UKNOF44 but I'm keen to talk more about this face to > face, UKNOF45 it shall have to be. > > Cheers, > James. >
