QUICast
Sending a live stream into the network once and letting millions of viewers receive it, instead of delivering a separate copy to every single one, that is the core idea behind new xG-portfolio team QUICast.
The Problem
As live audiences move online and single events draw millions of simultaneous viewers, the way streams are delivered hasn't kept up. Live streaming today runs almost entirely on unicast, meaning every viewer receives their own individual copy of the exact same bits. It works, but it forces the entire delivery chain – from origin server to the content delivery networks to the long-haul fiber backbones between networks – to reserve expensive capacity for the few moments when demand peaks. And because each connection takes its own path, viewer-to-viewer latency drifts. It's like a radio station placing a million separate phone calls to play everyone the same song, instead of simply broadcasting it once.
Their Solution
QUICast tackles this with multicast delivery designed for modern transport. The shared media is sent once and the network replicates the packets. It represents efficiency through the network, not duplication per viewer.
Crucially, the efficiency doesn't cost you security. The shared media travels over multicast, but verification, integrity, and operational metadata stay on each viewer's authenticated unicast channel, so control is never traded away for reach. Where multicast isn't available, the system falls back cleanly to a standard unicast path, so no viewer is left behind just because their network doesn't support it.
Why QUICast
Inter-Domain Multicast isn’t new. The internet already knows how to send one thing to many people efficiently, and that's exactly what multicast was built for.
What's missing, however, are security, reliability and privacy guarantees. The Multicast extension for QUIC has already shown them in the lab, but it lacks experience in practice through robust clients, operational tooling, and real pilots with operators and ISPs. That's the work QUICast is taking on. Secure and reliable multicast delivery, over today's transport layer, with a graceful fallback for networks that aren't ready yet.
This enables streaming:
Mass live events without cost scaling per viewer
Company-wide town halls
Large-scale product launches
And beyond video:
Software updates
Data Centers
Machine Learning
It leads to:
Tighter live synchronization, so viewers experience the moment together
Measurable bandwidth savings for operators and networks
The Team
Max Franke is leading the QUICast project. He has many years of experience in protocol design and network research. He is active in the IETF and works on standardizing various protocols related to Multicast and Transport.
Welcome to the xG-portfolio, we’re excited to see where you’re heading!
Website
Live Demo
LinkedIn Max Franke
