Re:well, not effortlessly (Score 3, Interesting)

As for winsock, that was a poor port of the BSD socket stack. Actually, it's a really poor port. Multicast still doesn't work, and if it did, an entire set of applications could occur with much lower traffic on the internet. (Think IPTV, IPRadio, and other streaming type applications)

Multicast still wouldn't work since the vast majority (at least here in Canada) of ISPs filter multicast packets because they think they are the same as broadcast packets and thus increase network traffic, I know about this since I worked on a project that had used multicast data transmission for communication and it worked on the local area network (a win2k network) but not when we tried to do it over the internet.

Like I said it turned out the ISP was filtering multicast and several told us they had no intention of turning it on because it increased network load. We explained that the difference in broadcast and multicast and that multicast would effectively lighter it they wouldn't believe us. This was my experience here in Canada 5- 6 years ago.

I will admit this was 6 years ago and things could have changed but I doubt it, ISPs in Canada tend to stagnation at times, it works so leave it alone. To use multicast you had to use Winsock 2.2 if I recall correctly, and we did see a tremendous benefit the network load on our project was greatly reduced.