Date and Time: Monday, November 8, 1300-1500 Location: TBA --- see final agenda on-site. *** This BOF will be Multicast *** The Future of IETF Multicast/Unicast Services --------------------------------------------- With recent changes in the IETF and ways in which interested parties participate, there is a new push to re-evaluate the mechanisms that are provided for remote participation and working group meeeting archiving. For the past several years, two sessions have been multicast at two bit rates (low and high). These sessions have also been recorded and made available relatively soon after the meeting. More recently, experiments have been conducted in an attempt to add additional rooms with unicast support but only audio. At this point, we are at a cross-roads. Because of perceived changes in remote participant needs and funding availability, the IETF needs to decide what is required in terms of service to users. Furthermore, an analysis needs to be done on what this service will cost and whether there is budget to support it. This BOF is a chance for the IETF community to discuss these issues in an open forum and help decide what our next steps should be in providing these services for future IETF meetings. To kick off the discussion, we will present a summary of the effort and resources involved in prior audio and video support and describe a few service options which might be provided in the future. We particularly would like to hear from past and current users of the IETF multicast/unicast services. Note that while Jabber use has become much more prevalent recently and its use affects how distance participation works, using instant messaging in IETF meetings is NOT the focus of this BOF. Some further background: ------------------------ "The March [1992] IETF meeting in San Diego was an exciting one for those interested in teleconferencing. In addition to several sessions on teleconferencing topics, we managed to pull off a "wild idea" suggested by Allison Mankin from MITRE: live audio from the IETF site was "audiocast" using IP multicast packet audio over the Internet to participants at 20 sites on three continents spanning 16 timezones. ... "We hope [this] will be expanded at future IETF meetings to reach more destinations and to include video, images and "shared whiteboards" along with audio. This is a step toward a more distributed IETF, a goal Dave Farber and Jack Haverty challenged the IET community to pursue during a discussion on the IETF mailing list last fall." --- Steve Casner and Steve Deering, "First IETF Internet Audiocast," ConneXions--The Interoperability Report, Volume 6, No. 6, June, 1992. Ole J. Jacobsen Editor and Publisher, The Internet Protocol Journal Academic Research and Technology Initiatives, Cisco Systems Tel: +1 408-527-8972 GSM: +1 415-370-4628 E-mail: ole@xxxxxxxxx URL: http://www.cisco.com/ipj _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf