[AG-TECH] Question: Access Grid on non-university, non-multicast network

[Christoph Willing]

On 04/10/2010, at 5:50 AM, Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson wrote:

> Hi friends,
>
> I work with a open software foundation, Akvo.org. We build internet  
> and mobile phone services for development aid. We are fairly spread  
> out geographically and Access Grid seemed a good solution for us to  
> be able to do multipart video conferencing.
>
> Our participants all sit on non-university type networks, i.e.  
> commercial ISPs.
>
> Is it possible and even meaningful to set up Access Grid without  
> reliable access to multicast capability?
> Can the public unicast bridges take care of this for us?


Thomas,

Many academic sites don't have good multicast connectivity either and  
its not unheard of to sometimes have all participating sites connected  
via a single unicast bridge.

I can't speak for all sites running bridges but I suspect that, for  
casual usage, there'd be no problem using the current bridges for non- 
academic traffic - we'd probably all see that as helping to spread AG  
usage. For large regular usage though (for some definitions of "large"  
and "regular"), some bridge sites may be less enthusiastic; many  
universities have different suppliers for their connections to  
academic and non-academic networks, often entailing serious additional  
costs for the traffic to/from non-academic networks. If you do go past  
the testing/feasibility stage, it may be best for your organisation to  
eventually run its own bridge.

The real issue for you may be more related to the bandwidth of  
individual participants' own ISP connections. At home, I have a bit  
less than 8Mb/s download and about 1Mb/ upload bandwidth. Thats just  
usable for smallish meetings of 4-5 participants (depending on the  
type and number of streams each site is sending) in which I could send  
a single low bandwidth stream (h261 format). Depending on the type of  
plan, long meetings could become expensive for the individual user too.

In principle, its definitely doable though.


chris


> I wanted to understand this before I go too far down this route,  
> only to find out that it may not be possible to do.
>
> Thanks for any insight on this!
>
> Thomas
> --
> Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson
> thomas at akvo.org
>
>
>

Christoph Willing                       +61 7 3365 8316
QCIF Access Grid Manager
University of Queensland