Is the only general solution to this problem: 'more edge servers'?
Or is there another technology that could be really helpful for this type of event?
Or is there another technology that could be really helpful for this type of event?
It wouldn't surprise me if these products can do the same thing for downstream traffic as well.
Everything old is new again, it's like the 1990s proxy servers brought into the 2000s-2010s.
I could well be out of the loop and not aware of any huge Squid or comparable installations, but I believed them to be archaic until recently because of how much faster commercial/service provider type WAN interfaces (DS-x, OC-x) were growing relative to consumer interfaces (DSL, cable). Of course FTTH (large bandwidth to each node) and wireless data (shared upstream + carrier optimizations for signal quality instead of bandwidth + physics) may turn this on it's head.
Also, because multicast duplicates packets, it could increase bandwidth usage in ways that are not easy to bill for, potentially increasing costs without increasing revenue. I don't think this is a real problem, but some people have cited it.
IP addresses (which we're running out of) address hosts. There are hundreds of millions of active full-time hosts.
Multicast addresses address content. How much more content is there than hosts? Do you really think it's feasible to give an IP address to every popular piece of content? YouTube allegedly gets almost 100,000 new videos per day.
The fact is, multicast hasn't been a success because it's simply not a good fit for the routing layer of the Internet. But edge overlay networks can build arbitrarily complex and interesting multicast service models on top of the Unicast Internet, and those overlays have been huge successes.
You still need to have every upstream router maintain awareness of every piece of content being viewed by every downstream user.
The future of one-to-many content delivery is in edge delivery networks like Akamai. Maybe they'll use a (drastically simplified) multicast model internally, but that's an implementation detail.