On a technical level, at this point in time, computers were treated as devices that made long-distance communication easier but only on peer-to-peer or peer-to-site level. Typical computers at the time only had unicast routers and could not receive information "packets" fast enough in order to watch any sort of continuous internet broadcast, which requires a noticably higher rate of transmission than the conventional webpage or email. M-Bone was a virtual network: software created by inventive computer programmers as a bypass method to do a job normally reserved for hardware because normal PC's were simply not equipped with the necessary hardware to handle high traffic. "The M-Bone is not a physical network distinct from the Internet. Rather, it consists of a "virtual network" layered atop the Internet using mrouters (routing machines equipped for multicast)."