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Can anyone recommend a textbook or online resource for learning the current state of multicast technology, from the perspective of a network engineer/designer?

The 'bible' that most of my more experienced colleagues seem to use is Developing IP Multicast Networks, by Williamson, which was published in 1999. Has multicast technology really not moved on since then? Or are the same principles and protocols still in use, without only incremental changes not warranting a newer text?

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  • Questions relating to professional education are off topic per the revised FAQ.
    – sysadmin1138
    Oct 10, 2012 at 21:56

1 Answer 1

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AIUI, no there haven't been any fundamental changes to the technology since 1999.

Multicast is certainly alive and well (see mDNS, OSPF, etc), but there's very little use of it beyond site-local / network-local.

That said, there are a number of ISPs in the UK taking part in the BBC's multicast trial, but IMO that's likely to die off since technical limitations of the most popular broadband architecture in the UK means there's no cost saving from using multicast instead of unicast.

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