What is MBone?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mbone (short for "multicast backbone") is an experimental backbone for multicast traffic across the Internet. Since most routers in Internet do not yet support multicast, the Mbone has evolved to connect multicast-capable networks over the existing Internet infrastructure. It is anticipated that the Mbone will eventually become obsolete as more routers understand and forward multicast traffic, which is a standard feature in IPv6. A major difficulty with the commercialization of multicast routers is that it is more difficult for an ISP to compute charges for multicast traffic.
The Mbone is currently of practical use for shared communication such as videoconferences or shared collaborative workspaces. The Mbone is not generally connected to Internet Service Providers but is often connected to universities and research institutions. Some other projects and network testbeds, such as Internet2's Abilene Network, have made Mbone obsolete.