Principles of the invention are described for providing virtual private local area network service (VPLS) multicast instances across a public network by utilizing multicast trees. In particular, the VPLS multicast instances transport layer two (L2) multicast traffic, such as Ethernet packets, between customer networks via the public network. The principles described herein enable VPLS multicast instances to handle high bandwidth multicast traffic. The principles also reduce the state and the overhead of maintaining the state in the network by removing the need to perform snooping between routers within the network.