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[REBOL] Re: The dark side of P2P column ...

From: holger:rebol at: 14-May-2001 20:10

On Mon, May 14, 2001 at 05:53:40PM -0700, Ryan Cole wrote:
> Holger, you said: > > "The ONLY situation where you can get away with not having any central servers at all is if you can use broadcasting or multicasting, but this is not possible > on the whole Internet (yet)." > > If you dont mind my asking, what did you mean by "(yet)"?
Internet-wide broadcasting will obviously remain impossible :-), but Internet-wide multicasting is possible at least in theory now. The technical framework exists (at least for IPv4, it is still somewhat sketchy for IPv6), but the organizational framework is still spotty. At the moment there are several multicasting testbeds (the biggest one is the MBone), consisting of interconnected multicast "islands" in the Internet "ocean", plus a few ISPs and streaming content providers use multicasting in a limited fashion to save bandwidth on their streaming media feeds. At this time multicasting is somewhat difficult to set up because you have to configure "multicast tunnels" between multicast-capable routers in order to participate in multicasting. Eventually, once all Internet routers become multicast-capable, multicasting should become completely transparent, Internet-wide. Btw, REBOL does support multicasting :-). -- Holger Kruse [holger--rebol--com]