Multicast Rising
by Steve Harriman, VP of Marketing - August 19, 2014
Multicast hasn’t been a hot topic in networking in recent years, but that may be changing with last week’s announcements by both AT&T and Verizon that they will launch LTE multicast in 2015. Verizon plans to start embedding the technology in phones in the fourth quarter of this year and commercially launch the service in 2015. AT&T will also begin to roll out multicast capabilities next year.
According to Verizon CFO Fran Shammo, multicast is “…the pivotal point that starts to change the way content is delivered over a mobile handset which opens up content into the wireless world."
As Humberto Saabedra explains in an article for PhoneNews.com: “LTE Multicast allows the same content to be sent to a large number of subscribers at the same time, resulting in a more efficient use of network resources than each user requesting the same content and then having the content individually streamed to each user.”
Currently, organizations use multicast for multimedia distribution, desktop imaging, market trading data distribution, broadcast video, online education, and other purposes where data must be delivered simultaneously to multiple receivers. Packet Continue reading