Forum

Wireless Jon, a number of people use wireless multicast for Video streaming. It can save a great deal of money compared to you wiring an entire dorm with coax for cable TV, for example and is much more flexibile. Like you said, since it sends traffic at the lowest rates, it can bring the rest of your wireless performance down. A number of WLAN manufacturers have algorithms that convert multicast frames to unicast frames so that they can be sent at higher rates. There are also some that support certain features that will allow the WLAN infrastructure to ONLY send multicast traffic to access points that have clients that subscribe to the stream, which saves considerable bandwidth. Lastly, some manufacturers also support dynamic multicast optimization that determines when it is more efficient to send traffic as unicast for a few clients, or leave multicast active for more than "x" clients.