Subject: [MBONED] Verizon worldwide deployment - question on Chromebook

From: Gyan Mishra <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2020 11:14:35 -0400

Toerless / All

I just remembered after the interim meeting yesterday the reason why
Chromebook does not support multicast.

Since Chromebooks use Chrome browser as the GUI user interface it has the
same issue with not supporting NPAPI plugin.  So is unable to play
multicast natively just as with a standalone chrome browser on a pc.
Verizon has discussions with Google developers related to using Web-RTC
messaging to do the translation from multicast to unicast and we had an
engagement where me representing Verizon acted as liaison go between with
Ramp and Chromebook to see if the agent could work on Chromebook as it does
on Microsoft Windows and Mac.  There was some completely as Google places
both the development of Chromebook and Android OS mobile phone in one
bucket development platform container so that created many challenges.  I
have to dig up my notes but from what I remember we got to the point where
it was possible but Google did not see the urgency to make it happen to
support multicast.  That was disappointing for Verizon.  I will try to
follow up again to see if we can still make traction on that end as I see
multicast should be a standard capability for all platforms including all
mobile devices.  With that thread with Google will bring up Android OS and
ask about multicast support for Android if that can happen and business
necessity and that it could potentially be a marketing strategy for Android
over Apple.

At the end of the call mobile device multicast was discussed and I agree
that could be very powerful almost like bit torrent peer to peer
multicast.  On the 5G infrastructure side the RAN radio network cell tower
backhaul am guessing for peer to peer multicast would have to support pim
bidir MVPN MP2MP MDTs using any of the p-tunnel tunnel encapsulations.  I
can see that being very powerful and of course the massive bandwidth
savings for providers using multicast over unicast steaming.

At the end of call was also discussed MBONED access via any modern browser
with does not support NPAPI and finding a solution for this issue.

This is a critical industry wide issue with multicast for all enterprises
and service providers related to source or receiver endpoints not being
able to support multicast playback via web browser.

I did some extensive research on this issue a few years back before we
migrated to SSM and was only able to find 2 companies that supported an
agent based solution which was Ramp I mentioned in the presentation and
cisco vBrick.  All other methods required some extensive development and
Verizon investigated that option of possible solution with WebRTC but due
to support issues ongoing with in house we decided on off the shelf product.

I just joined MBONED yesterday and look forward to be part of the many
multicast discussions.

Kind regards

Gyan
-- 

Gyan  Mishra

Network Engineering & Technology

Verizon

Silver Spring, MD 20904

Phone: 301 502-1347

Email: [email-masked]