This presentation will highlight the development and experience gained during the introduction of native inter-domain multicast in the European research community on the TEN-155 network, as well as the decisions made for its successor network, GEANT.

The first part of the presentation will cover the process of migrating from the previous MBone to an infrastructure based on PIM-SM and MBGP/MSDP. This provided a multicast service to 18 European countries with interconnections to commercial ISPs (e.g., AUCS-Infonet, UUNET) and to the US research network Abilene. The presentation will outline operational experience and results gained from mechanisms put in place to monitor multicast traffic.

The second section of the talk will concentrate on the deployment of GEANT, the successor to TEN-155, which is a 10 Gbit/s pan-European network. It will carry multicast traffic for 28 countries in Europe by February 2002, and will be interconnected with several US and Canadian research networks (Abilene, Esnet, Canarie) plus commercial ISPs. The presentation will focus on the technical choices made for the design of multicast, and plans for offering multicast as a fully supported service from an operational perspective. In this context, the authors will present the first results obtained from monitoring the core backbone and customers with an enhanced version of the public domain tool Beacon.

About the Presenters
In 1998, Agnes Pouele began working at the National Research Center of Science in France for the UREC (networking) department as an ATM network engineer. Since 1999, she has been a member of the network planning team at DANTE, where she is involved in the design and planning of the Pan-European networks TEN-155, and now GEANT. She works in various areas, from IP routing to advanced technologies, and is currently involved in multicast deployment.

Jan Novak has been working for various data service providers (X.25, FR) since 1994, subsequently moving to Internet service providers in the Czech Republic (there acquiring CCIE certification for IP routing in 1996) and the UK. At these ISPs, he was also a member of the network engineering and routing teams for IP network design, testing, implementation and troubleshooting. One year ago, he joined Cisco Systems to provide dedicated technical support for larger European Internet service providers.