Running of the corporate bulls

Multicasting could lessen useless corporate intranet bandwidth consumption

Copyright 2001Satellite Broadband. Full text in March 2001 edition of Satellite Broadband. Excerpts below involve Helius.

Streams rumbling into a corrate intranet can look a lot like the running of the bulls.

A hoard of big burly bulls, each representing a 300 kilobits per second (kbps) stream, bombard a thin road, the intranet's delicate bandwidth, until all the spectators either get out of the way or suffer the fate of a bull's horn.

The only difference is that information systems managers (IS) of most corporate intranets won't allow the running of the streams to commence in fear of bandwidth over consumption.

Multicasting, however, might be the solution that turns those IS managers into matadors, waving the red flag for one of those bulls to charge through. Multicasting means only one 300 kbps stream has to enter the network in order for everyone logged onto the corporate intranet to view the show.

Out of the gates

And there are a host of companies either already or will be providing multicasting communications services to enterprises.

"Certainly the issue that you deal with when you go inside a corporate LAN (local area network) or even a LAN segment, you have the issue of if you have rich video, a 300 kbps video, can you deliver that to every desktop in the LAN. Without multicasting you have a lot of issues associated with doing that," says Bob Ogdon, Mshow.com chief executive officer and chairman. "They're training a group of people and they're all in the same LAN segment and you have 40 people getting 300 kbps of data at 40 desktops and you're unicasting at that LAN, you have some issues you're going to run into. What a lot of IT departments are doing who don't multicast is they'll let in 15 streams and then they will cut them off. Then for the other 15 people, they don't get video; they only get audio. We would like them to all get the video and they can only do that with a multicasting solution. ...

"We provide the service from beginning to end of a live interactive event," says Ogdon. "Everything from scheduling it to producing to having production for video capture if necessary to helping people create content to running the real-time show with help desk support and show manager show to post-show reporting of the voting and polling data and helping people create registration Web sites and archived."

Doing so in a unicast format is often very difficult because of bandwidth constraints, which prompted Mshow.com to use multicast enabled streams for those companies that need to save bandwidth on their networks.

"Our streaming partners all offer unicast and multicast combined," says Ogdon. "When you're doing an event you have a mixture of unicast and multicast in that event. For those enterprises that have established a multicast foundation, then they'll get a multicast solution. They'll get one stream that will come in through Real or Windows Media that are both multicast enabled and that will multicast through that LAN setting."

El Matador

But multicasting through a corporate intranet isn't always as simple as it sounds. There are issues that drive IS managers to pull out their swords and strike down the bull before a good show has given the crowd a reason to cheer.

"The first thing that you're going to find when you get into the IP multicast world and the corporation is you're going to be dealing with a new group of people that you've never dealt with before," said Helius chief executive officer Myron Mosbarger. "That's the IS manager. The first thing they're going to say to you is how much bandwidth is this going to consume on my network.

"We put a system in at Brigham Young University and we put it on their backbone. Not a problem there but in order to pipe it across their campus they needed to go through a series of switches or hubs that were only 10 Mbps. So your looking at what does a feed do to my network, the IS managers are really quick to say hold it you are going to consume my bandwidth, slow down my performance and I won't be able to deliver to my customers the things that they demand. People who have 100 Mbps networks, that's just fine."

The problem occurs when the information is cached on the network for others to grab and view when they choose.

"If you stored that in the system, then there goes all your bandwidth," Mosbarger says. "Let's say this training company sends a multimedia feed to you and then if they store it and replay it again from the corporate intranet. Every individual player that watches it again potentially could consume bandwidth on the corporate intranet on the replay, unless everybody stores it on their local harddrive, then you wouldn't have any problem at all."

But using the bandwidth the way Mshow.com uses it for a onetime live feed is an effective use that won't hinder an IS manager, Mosbarger said.

Still there are other issues involved with multicasting over a corporate intranet that involve software compatibility.

"Another thing you have to deal with is that in some cases there isn't a lot of compatibility or the kind of compatibility that there should be between multicast feeds and viewer," Mosbarger says. "You have to look at the viewers you will be using and the encoder that's going to send it across the system. Here again, that's something that impacts your IS manager because they're the one's that are responsible for the software on the client PCs." ...

In fact, the only way to improve the quality of service is to use satellite to distribute the multicast enabled stream.

"In terms of QoS (quality of service) there's a huge differences," Mosbarger says. "Whenever you multicast over satellite, you only have essentially one hop to deal with and that's from the uplink to the remote IP multicast router on the other side. But once you multicast through the Internet, you have to make sure you have ISPs that can handle multicast and you don't have control over the number of routers or the path that it would take."

But streaming video and other content through the corporate network is the direction corporate communications are headed and not even the 500-pound bull or stubborn matador is going to get in the way. ...

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