Internet Multicast – Understanding Multicast Over the Internet

greinternetmulticast

I was going through the use cases of GRE tunnel and see that it is also used to carry multicast traffic over the internet.I understand that multicast IP belongs to class D address which is a public IP and can be routed.

Q1:Why is multicast not supported over the internet ? Why do we need to encapsulate in GRE ? Can you please explain in laymen terms ?

Q2:When we use the term 'internet', what exactly does it refer to?
Would it be collection of all ISPs across the world?

Best Answer

A1: Because normally you need to run PIM protocol in order to achieve end-to-end connectivity for multicast network. PIM doesn't normally run between ISP boundaries. It would be pretty complicated and protocol itself wasn't designed for that scale.

A2: It depends. From networking point of view I would say that Internet is merely a collection of public routes, i. e. BGP full view.