Enabling multicast on Wireless

[Andrew MacTaggart]

Greetings

I know it's possible but I wonder if it is advisable to configure multicast on wireless network.

We have 3 WLC 5508 with 7.0.98.0 code and Base license

we have over 160 AP's running N

the clients are connected in a great big address pool - with possibility of 8000+ host ip's

we currently have over 1000+ clients connecting

Management expects wireless to work like a wired network.

They want to enable multicast for applications like Apple Bonjour and other programs and also for streaming video.

I am of the opinion it's not the greatest of ideas.

I see people enabling multicast but not on the scale with the user base we have.

any advise

[Nicholas Poole]

I have enabled multicast on wireless before, but not on this scale.  First of all the idea of having so many clients in the same IP range doesnt seem a good idea regardless of multicast.  Assuming you set up multicast on the WLC and LAN correctly, then having a lot of receivers is what multicast was designed for (however wireless multicast performance isnt as good as wired, not sure about the new features in WLC v7).  The questions to ask is how many IPmc sources you might have?  If there are a lot of sources, then this will be a problem rather than how many receivers there are.

[Andrew MacTaggart]

Thanks for the Info

Yeah IBM setup the wireless, and I sort of inherited it. I had asked them to split up the subnet, but they said it was easier for mobility. Originally the subnet was created with 2000+ hosts with lease set for 1 hour, but I found we ran out of addresses, so I expanded it.

[George Stefanick]

Now thats funny ...

I started here about 2 years ago right after the IBM wireless install... They did something very similar ... Im not impressed with IBMs wireless skill set ..