A few comments:
I'm very supportive of both trying to deploy multicast and trying to
make it possible to participate in IETF meetings from remote locations.
But if the current effort isn't working, maybe we need to try something
different.
Do you think the broadcasts aren't working or
multicast connectivity isn't working? Both? Something
different?
Or as a first step perhaps we could take some concrete and relatively
easy steps to determine how well things are working:
1. poll WG chairs from the last IETF to see how many people contributed
things in real time from remote locations.
Well, not relevant; most people listen, just as they
do when they are present (and BTW, this is a completely
legitimate reason to do the multicasts).
2. if we have a list of email addresses of multicast participants from
the last IETF, ask those folks how well it worked for them.
Surveys of this type are hard to do, but it would be
interesting to understand what worked. Extrapolating
from that to what the user problem is, however, is
likely impossible (after the fact), and so the data
will be less useful that one might like.
3. for the next meeting, update the IETF web pages to describe how to
attend the meeting via multicast - where to get the tools for your
particular platform, how to determine whether your ISP supports
multicast, and so on.
Much of this information is available on
http://videolab.uoregon.edu
Finally, its our (IETF) technology. If its not good
enough for us to use, then we might want to think about
what we're doing and why. Its also important to note that
for the 1-to-many case of IETF broadcast, the problems
that we face in todays multicast world will be somewhat
eased by SSM deployment.
Dave