Stressing that it will be a marketing and educational forum, the charter members of the newly-created IP Multicast Initiative held their first meeting last Thursday in the San Francisco Bay Area. Charter members, including the likes of Cisco Systems Inc, Microsoft Corp, Netscape Communications Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc, have each spent $25,000 to fund the Initiative. When compared to bandwidth-hungry unicasting, which sets up a separate point-to-point data stream between the sender and each receiver, or broadcasting, which sends the stream to everyone on the network, multicasting uses network bandwidth more efficiently for applications that distribute data to multiple recipients, sending a single stream of data that can be accessed by any recipient that wants the information. Chairman Karen Milne says that the goal of the Initiative is to increase IP Multicast usage on the Internet by serving as, essentially, the marketing agent for the technology. Ms Milne adds, we are adamant from the outset that we will not be doing standards. That will be the province of the Internet Engineering Task Force – which participates on the Initiative’s advisory council. Milne is also the president of Stardust Technologies Inc, the company best known for providing WinSock certification and one of the driving forces behind the IP Multicast Initiative, along with Judy Estrin’s Precept Software Inc. Following Thursday’s meeting, the group is chartered to expand its membership, commission studies into IP Multicast usage on the Internet, and begin a number of educational initiatives. It will commission white papers, host a seminar series and develop a home page. A general membership meeting open to all interested parties wi ll be held on December 13 to coincide with the Internet Engineering Task Force’s meeting in San Jose. An exact location has not yet been chosen, but you can bet that it won’t be too far from the San Jose Fairmont. General membership goes from $5,000 to $25,000, depending on the size of the company. The charter members are 3Com Corp, Bay Networks Inc, Cabletron Systems Inc, Cascade Communications Corp, Cisco Systems Inc, FTP Software Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp, Intel Corp, Intelsat, Micr osoft Corp, Netscape Communications Corp, Precept, Silicon Graphics Inc, StarBurst Communications Corp, Stardust, Sun Microsystems Inc, TIBCO, Vivo Software Inc, White Pine Software Inc and Xerox Corp Palo Alto Research Center. Information on the IP Multicast Initiative can be found on Stardust’s Web site at http://www.stardust.com/multi.
