gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) (05/13/88)
My last bill from uunet was for about 2 to 4 times as many minutes as I could account for from my system login records. I checked this with Rick and he told me, for the first time, that uunet has a 3 minute minimum charge, applied for both incoming and outgoing calls. Since we use a Telebit modem, the breakdown of calls in April was: calls minutes (from "last Uuunet" output) 139 00 87 01 19 02 3 03 2 04 3 05 4 06 1 07 2 08 1 10 The above adds to 214 minutes; if the 0-minute calls are billed as 1-minute calls, the sum is 353 minutes. This about half of the 756 minutes we were billed for outgoing calls. Note that billing us for 3 minutes for each call is overcharging for 99% of the calls. I recommend that other Telebit uunet users change your dialing patterns to avoid these overcharges. There is no easy way to get uunet to only call you when it has 3 minutes' worth of data to send (or, say, once a day for less traffic than that), so I have switched back to polling uunet twice a day. That way I'm only charged for 6 minutes/day unless I have more than about 400K of traffic that day. In April my SYSLOG shows that we moved 5,537,547 bytes with uunet. Since we were billed about $109 for this (not including the $30/mo membership fee), it cost about $19/meg. On Telebits, a meg moves in about 15 minutes, so it should cost about $2 at $8/hr. There is certainly more overhead when moving smaller files around, but a factor of 10 is too much! -- John Gilmore {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@toad.com "Use the Source, Luke...."
rick@seismo.CSS.GOV (Rick Adams) (05/14/88)
> as I could account for from my system login records. I checked > this with Rick and he told me, for the first time, that uunet > has a 3 minute minimum charge, applied for both incoming and outgoing > calls. EVERY uunet subscription form ever distributed has said that there is a 3 minute minimum connect charge. I am looking at the original subscription form that was sent in for hoptoad. It says quite clearly (10 point type, centered on the page and offset from the rest of the text by blank lines): There is a three minute minimum connect charge. We start billing when uucico logs the "OK (startup)" message in the logfile. It takes at least a minute to reach this point (modem syncs, login chat script run, protocol startup, etc). If the call doesn't reach this point, it isn't charged for. The three minute minimum is an artifact of Tymnet. Tymnet bills at a 3 minute minimum. The awk script that does the billing currently applies the minimum to all calls. It may be necessary to adjust the minimum for the dialups. (Adjusting the minimum may require raising the rate. The failed calls must be paid for somewhere). However, note that a zero minute uucp session is silly. --rick
sullivan@vsi.UUCP (Michael T Sullivan) (05/18/88)
In article <44311@beno.seismo.CSS.GOV>, rick@seismo.CSS.GOV (Rick Adams) writes: > EVERY uunet subscription form ever distributed has said that there is a > 3 minute minimum connect charge. I am looking at the original > subscription form that was sent in for hoptoad. It says quite clearly > (10 point type, centered on the page and offset from the rest of the > text by blank lines): > > There is a three minute minimum connect charge. I am looking at the subscription form sent to us and it is mentioned, but not offset from the rest of the page. It is the fourth sentence in the "What Does It Cost" section along with the other sentences. I'm not complaining about this because it is mentioned, I'm just saying that on ours it wasn't that prominent. -- Michael Sullivan {uunet|attmail}!vsi!sullivan sullivan@vsi.com HE V MTL Anybody out there remember Max Webster?