lyndon@ncc.Nexus.CA (Lyndon Nerenberg) (07/25/88)
In article <379@uport.UUCP> @uport.UUCP (John Plocher) writes:
[ The "inner" quotes are mine --lyndon ]
*| | | It costs me $4.00 every time their modem answers (3 minute minimum
*| | | charge per call). That's four dollars for every LOGIN FAILED, etc.,
*| | +----
*| | How does uunet determine its billing?
*| +----
*| Uunet does not bill like this.
*| Rick has ESP mabye?
*+----
*
*Not uunet, dammit, Ma Bell. Long distance on certain carriers with
*their own calling plans. Ma Bell charges starting whenever the other
*end of the line answers. She don't care if the modems ever *do* anything,
*she gets her $ out of you.
*
* -John Plocher
UUNET isn't the problem, at least as far as the above example is
concerned. The problem is I deal with an LD carrier who insists
that any call out of the province is worth at least a buck a
minute, and worth that for at least three minutes, every time.
[ Garry isn't reading this, I hope :-) ] If you look at the
throughput we can expect from a Trailblazer, we should be able to
bring in comp.all, news.all, gnu.all, bionet.all, and unix-pc.all
for about $300/month. As it turns out, this costs well over $1000/month
due to
a) AGT's braindamaged billing system (sorry, no alternate
carriers in Canada, and I don' think I would want one
anyway after what I've read in telecom...) Every failed
call (of which there are too many) cost us $4.00
exclusive of the uunet charges, which are *trivial*
b) uunet has fast modems and CPU's, but not fast
(enough) disks (watch the delays between
files - 800BPS throuhput during transfers, but
closer to 400BPS with file delays. It gets worse
with small mail files). [Yes, we're 9600 between
the TB's and our Sun, but that's another story]
If anything, uunet is too fair in their billing in that they
don't (cannot) charge the internet sites that use them as an
ftp repository and mail relay. There is such a thing as *too*
well connected (remember ihnp4?)
--
VE6BBM {alberta,pyramid,uunet}!ncc!lyndon lyndon@Nexus.CAaad@stpstn.UUCP (Anthony A. Datri) (07/26/88)
Am I missing something? Wouldn't calling uunet via Tymnet, as recommended, be cheaper than dialing them directly? I'm about to subscribe us to uunet, so I'd like to know. -- @disclaimer(Any concepts or opinions above are entirely mine, not those of my employer, my GIGI, or my 11/34) beak is beak is not Anthony A. Datri,SysAdmin,StepstoneCorporation,stpstn!aad
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (07/28/88)
In article <1917@stpstn.UUCP> aad@stpstn.UUCP (Anthony A. Datri) writes: >Am I missing something? Wouldn't calling uunet via Tymnet, as recommended, >be cheaper than dialing them directly? Quite possibly not, if you're doing the direct call with a Trailblazer modem. Tymnet is an expensive way to ship bulk data, because they charge for volume as well as for connect time. The effective hourly rate for bulk data movement over Tymnet is much higher than you'd think, once you add in the per-byte or per-packet charges. -- MSDOS is not dead, it just | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology smells that way. | uunet!mnetor!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
aad@stpstn.UUCP (Anthony A. Datri) (08/03/88)
The information that uunet sent me doesn't say anything about volume charges, it just lists various connect time rates, down to $4/hour off-peak for Tymmnet, .... I'm not familiar with tymnet -- I just figured it was like Telenet where the remote host pays for it. I'd like to connect to uunet for reliability and ease of routing. We currently pay $200 a month for a line from the exchange where our primary feed is. If calling via tymnet with our existing 2400 baud vadic is cheaper than that, then everyone's happy. We only keep a subset of groups since we have no need/desire for the others, and aren't the only feed for anyone else. I'd like to get rid of that $200 a month phone line, and the uunet document I got says: "At 2400 bps via Tymnet, a full news feed would cost about $190 per month in connect time" I figured that since we only get a fraction of the groups, that the $30 a month plus the connect time would be < $200 a month, with increased reliability and ease of routing. Now that I see that many people use Trailblazers and experience savings, I'm going to have to take the posted costs for groups and add them up, and see what looks cheaper for us. I don't know that I could get the company to spend the $$ for a Trailblazer only on the promise of eventual recovery of the cost. I also have to dig in and discover phone costs from here to uunet. Our voice lines have some sort of auto-selection for which carrier is cheapest; I don't think that's on on our data lines. The discussion of TB's that I've seen seems to indicate that they're quite good on non-perfect lines, and I interpolate this to mean that they should work fine with MCI, etc... Our regional phone company is SNET. I welcome any and all advice, even if it's just "get a TB". As far as I can tell, a once or twice a night poll would be just fine. If we need to get mail in or out in a hurry, we can send it to a secondary feed. -- @disclaimer(Any concepts or opinions above are entirely mine, not those of my employer, my GIGI, or my 11/34) beak is beak is not Anthony A. Datri,SysAdmin,StepstoneCorporation,stpstn!aad
james@bigtex.uucp (James Van Artsdalen) (08/05/88)
In article <1951@stpstn.UUCP>, aad@stpstn.UUCP (Anthony A. Datri) wrote: > [...] I don't know that I could get the company to spend the $$ for a > Trailblazer only on the promise of eventual recovery of the cost. If they won't buy fairly simple arithmetic on TB+ cost savings when getting a full news feed from uunet, I can't imagine how the *rather* murky benefits of the net at 2400bps ever justified the feed in the first place! > The discussion of TB's that I've seen seems to indicate that > they're quite good on non-perfect lines, and I interpolate this to mean that > they should work fine with MCI, etc... Our regional phone company is SNET. Well... I've announced anonymous uucp downloads on my TB+ and have had a number of people call in. And I've seen some remarkably bad transfer rates. The vast majority of calls do stay near 9600bps (max rate bigtex can talk to the TB+), but a fair number get throughputs down in the 300-400cps range. Of the people I've later contacted, most were using Uncle Joe's Quick & Dirty long distance. A couple of sites called back later on AT&T and got reasonable transfer rates The point is that "saving" money buy not getting a TB+ may not make any economic sense, and "saving" 10% on LD may not make sense if you take a 50% hit in throughput. In addition, uunet has WATS call-out ability and 800 numbers for calling in, and these are quite cheap. None of my long distance discount plans are nearly as cheap as uunet's 800 number charges... -- James R. Van Artsdalen ...!ut-sally!utastro!bigtex!james "Live Free or Die" Home: 512-346-2444 Work: 328-0282; 110 Wild Basin Rd. Ste #230, Austin TX 78746