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I did a bunch of multicast programming in the early days of Android, and I discovered that: - most Android devices back then required a special OS call to tall

I did a bunch of multicast programming in the early days of Android, and I discovered that: - most Android devices back then required a special OS call to tall the wireless chipset to listen to multicast packets at all --- otherwise they'd just ignore them and not wake up; - in about half the devices, this switch didn't actually work; - in an astonishing amount of consumer routers, multicast routing doesn't actually work; - multicast on mobile is so, so, so not worth the effort. I expect that multicast is way better supported these days. I would be totally unsurprised if it were not.

indolering 10y ago
> I expect that multicast is way better supported these days. I would be totally unsurprised if it were not. I wouldn't be, how often is multicast really used? Coming from the broadcast era, it seemed like a no-brainer. But the internet is built for n:n communication. Special cases for n:1 cost more in terms of engineering effort than would be saved in bandwidth and processing overhead.
- SmellyGeekBoy 10y ago
  Some IPTV services in the UK use it (at least BT and TalkTalk with their YouView packages and probably off-the-shelf YouView as well). I had a bit of a nightmare trying to get it working with BT TV when I upgraded from their godawful HomeHub to an ASUS router. Pretty much every time I've upgraded my router firmware I've lost TV service and had to reconfigure it. Apparently multicast is hard, even if you're a networking company!