The first growing pain is simply that more users means more bandwidth. And when the media is video, it is Bandwidth with a capital “B”. However, we should point out the MBONE users are good net citizens. By using multicast, they are being as thrifty as possible with bandwidth. The real problem here is the use of audio and video on the Internet, not the MBONE, per se. Bandwidth must increase across the board, and especially on backbones, or else the “Information Superhighway” will suffer from perpetual gridlock due to the introduction of audio and video.

Security, support for low bandwidth connections, and extensibility to new data types are other growing pains. Lets look at them in more detail.