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Networking Advanced

What is Multicast?

A network communication method that sends data to multiple recipients simultaneously without duplicating packets for each recipient.

Multicast sends one packet that is replicated by the network to reach all interested receivers, unlike unicast (one-to-one) which requires separate packets per recipient. This is efficient for streaming media, stock market feeds, and software updates.

Multicast uses special IP ranges (224.0.0.0–239.255.255.255) and IGMP (Internet Group Management Protocol) for group membership. While efficient, multicast is complex to configure and not well supported across the public internet — mostly used in enterprise LANs and ISP networks.

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