dan@hrc.UUCP (Dan Troxel) (09/30/89)
Is it worth using the PC Pursuit Telenet lines using a Telebit Plus? Our calls are getting steep, and am considering Telenet. By the way, what is their marketing number to sign up? -- Dan Troxel @ Handwriting Research Corporation WK 1-602-957-8870 Camelback Corporate Center 2821 E. Camelback Road Suite 600 Phoenix, AZ 85016 ncar!noao!asuvax!hrc!dan zardoz!hrc!dan hrc!dan@asuvax.asu.edu
patrick@chinet.chi.il.us (Patrick A. Townson) (10/01/89)
In article <200875@hrc.UUCP> dan@hrc.UUCP (Dan Troxel) writes: > >Is it worth using the PC Pursuit Telenet lines using a Telebit Plus? >Our calls are getting steep, and am considering Telenet. > >By the way, what is their marketing number to sign up? The rates are 30 hours for $30 per month -- OR -- 60 hours for $50 per month, in the 'family' plan. This means under the first rate, you pay $1 per hour. Under the second rate, you pay 83 cents per hour. Both types allow multiple packages. That is, you could purchase two accounts at $50 each, and you would receive 120 hours per month for $100, or 60 hours per month for $60. I would say if you need to buy more than 30 hours per month, you'd be better off (first) with the 'family membership' of 60 hours/$50 then two individual memberships at 60/$60, then 3 individual memberships at 90/$90 then 2 family memberships at 120/$100 in that order. Two family memberships gets you 120 hours per month -- or 4 hours per night, which ought to enable you to move your mail and news, etc. One problem is you must purchase pre-paid time (or memberships) in advance, or you will pay BIG $$$ if you run overtime. I think they charge somewhere around $ per hour if your package runs out. For example, lets say you purchase the 30 hour per month package. If you go 5 hours over -- using 35 hours in the month -- the 5 hours of overtime costs about $20+, and for that extra money, you could have purchased the 'family' membership and gotten an extra 30 hours. When you sign up, they ask which kind you want, regular or family, and how many you want of each. You can decide, and if you see that you consistently run overtime then you call and get converted to a larger pre-paid package. I would suggest starting larger than necessary, and backing down to what you realistically use, allowing a buffer of a few hours per month. You will get a print out each month showing your connections and how long they lasted; the total time used, etc. They give a one minute grace period at the start of each connection to allow for problems. Everything is rounded to the next highest minute, meaning more than one minute is charged as two minutes, etc. If you encounter line trouble, modem trouble or whatever and disconnect within the first minute there will be no charge. You have to keep track of which account you are on as the month goes along. When you see one pre-paid plan is about to run out of purchased time and go into overtime, then you want to switch to the other account. They may have changed this; I read something that they were going to start allowing the accounts to be combined for billing purposes; you will need to ask them. They have 2400 baud outdials in almost every city they serve. The rest are 1200 baud. Most cities have incoming 2400 baud lines as well. They offer free tech support by connecting on their network with a collect call to @C PURSUIT. For more information or to sign up -- Customer Service 1-800-TELENET By Modem: 1-800-835-3001 They accept credit cards and also can bill using 'checkfree' where you give them an authorizatiion to draft your bank each month. Before the charge goes through, you get the bill about ten days before, to check over the charges. I hope this helps you a little. I've subscribed to PC Pursuit for about five years, and find it a very useful and economical service. -- Patrick Townson patrick@chinet.chi.il.us / ptownson@eecs.nwu.edu / US Mail: 60690-1570 FIDO: 115/743 / AT&T Mail: 529-6378 (!ptownson) / MCI Mail: 222-4956
dpi@loft386.UUCP (Doug Ingraham) (10/02/89)
In article <200875@hrc.UUCP>, dan@hrc.UUCP (Dan Troxel) writes: > > Is it worth using the PC Pursuit Telenet lines using a Telebit Plus? > Our calls are getting steep, and am considering Telenet. > If you have a TB+ currently it is cheaper to use that and pay long distance than using PC Pursuit. Telenet doesn't have 2400 baud in my local area so I had to use it at 1200. I am using AT&T reach out America. Here is how the comparison goes: Hours of operation: PC Pursuit hours are 6:00pm - 8:00am. 14 hours/day max. Reach out America program hours are 10:00pm - 8:00am. 10 hours/day max. Data transfer rate. TB+ performance averages 1000cps with transfers as high as 1400cps. PC Pursuit is 2400 baud max or 240cps which you can't get using uucp g. 150cps is probably a good figure. The best I ever got using 1200 baud was 72cps. Maximum daily throughput: 10 hours @ 1000cps = 36000000 bytes/day using a TB+ and Reach Out America. 14 hours @ 150cps = 7560000 bytes/day on PC pursuit. TB+ can move 4.7 times as much data/day. According to the news statistics we are over 7 megabytes/day making it just barely possible to use PC Pursuit for a full feed. But not for very long. A full feed is less than 2 hours/day via TB+. Your phone will be tied up at least 4 times longer/day with PCP than with a TB+. Cost of each service/hour: Reach Out America costs $6.90/hour during the programs hours. PC Pursuit costs $1.00/hour for 30 hour blocks or $0.83/hour for 60 hour blocks. Cost of each service/megabyte: TB+ costs $2.01/megabyte moved. PC Pursuit goes for $1.61/megabyte moved at 2400 baud. Since many places don't have 2400 baud the figure for 1200 baud is twice that or $3.22/megabyte moved. The PCP costs can be twice as much as these figures show if you have to buy extra blocks which you don't end up using or if you go very much over your block allocation. On the surface PCP looks like a bargain. But in fact it is not because you have to do the time management on the blocks yourself and sometimes (for me it was often) you must wait hours (yes hours) for an outdial to become available in the connecting city. -- Doug Ingraham (SysAdmin) Lofty Pursuits (Public Access for Rapid City SD USA) uunet!loft386!dpi
rick@kimbal.UUCP (Rick Kimball) (10/03/89)
From article <9713@chinet.chi.il.us>, by patrick@chinet.chi.il.us (Patrick A. Townson): > They have 2400 baud outdials in almost every city they serve. The rest > are 1200 baud. Most cities have incoming 2400 baud lines as well. > I used to subscribe to PC Pursuit when it was $30 per month of unlimited off peak time. The reason I stopped using it was the fact that even though they have 2400 baud modems, when using UUCP, 1300 baud was the best I could achieve. During the grace period when they switched over to 30 a month, I monitored my time and found I was on the phone 75 hours for just a limited USENET feed. I decided it would be cheaper to move my house. :-) Also, when I used Ma Bell to call a long distance number, if I got a busy signal I didn't get charged for the call. Unless things have changed since May, PC Pursuit cannot tell if you get a busy signal after you successfully connect with a remote PCP modem. All it knows is the clock starts running one minute after you connect with that remote modem. Sometimes it takes longer than a minute to go through a UUCP chat script only to find out that the number was busy. Rick Kimball
tanner@ki4pv.uucp (Dr. T. Andrews) (10/05/89)
The normal cost shown for PC-P is $1/hour. This is rather
optimistic, assuming that
(a) monthly usage is exactly the number of 30-hour
blocks pre-purchased
(b) there is no charge to reach the telenet in-dial.
If your usage is both constant and an integral multiple of
thirty hours, I'd be amused to hear from you. (If you know
just when you top the 30 hours and can break connections,
re-dial using the "next" PC-P user ID, and continue without
lossage, let us all hear about it.)
In this area, the nearest telenet in-dial is long-distance,
though discounts can reduce it to 4.2 cents/minute at night
with a special calling plan. Since it's a 1200-baud dial-in,
and we could manage to get 80 CPS through it, a pair of `blazers
managed a rather fast pay-back. [No, I'm not a company hero.
Even if I invited them to watch the next time I walked across the
pool I wouldn't be a hero. There's gratitude for you.]
--
...!bikini.cis.ufl.edu!ki4pv!tanner ...!bpa!cdin-1!ki4pv!tanner
or... {allegra attctc gatech!uflorida uunet!cdin-1}!ki4pv!tannerkls@ditka.UUCP (Karl Swartz) (10/09/89)
In article <7122@ki4pv.uucp> tanner@ki4pv.uucp (Dr. T. Andrews) writes: >The normal cost shown for PC-P is $1/hour. If you buy 60 hours for $50 it's about $0.83/hour, again assuming you use all the time you buy and don't have to pay to reach an in- dial. Let's assume you actually use only 30 of your 60 hours (and don't fall back to the 30 hour/$30 rate), so you're paying $0.0139 per minute. For comparison, AT&T's Reach Out America now runs $6.90/hour, or a cost of $0.115 per minute. At 1200 baud PC Pursuit (with uucicos patched to WINDOWS=7) can do about 109 CPS, giving a cost of $4.25 to transfer 1 megabyte. At 2400 baud it's about 220 CPS or $2.10/megabyte. The TB with Reach Out America can easily manage 1000 CPS or better, costing you the princely sum of $1.92/megabyte. That's better than PC Pursuit at even the fastest speed, which isn't available to many folks, and there's also the opportunity cost of only tying up your phone line (and serial port and modem) for one-fifth or one-tenth the time. And not having to deal with the jerks at Telenet has got to be worth something too. On the other hand, a mail-only link doesn't have much use for high volume transfers. Given a typical message size of a megabyte even 1200 baud PC Pursuit can do the transfer in under 10 seconds. But in this case there will be a minute, often two, of overhead to set up the conversation. Now the TrailBlazer costs you $0.23 to move that message, while PC Pursuit (at either speed) costs under $0.06, less than one-fourth the cost. The advantage is even bigger in a state like California which has exorbitant intrastate long distance charges. A two-minute call to Los Angeles from San Jose costs $0.35, over six times what the same call via PC Pursuit would cost. I despise Telenet, but the numbers don't lie. I use a TrailBlazer and Reach Out America for news feeds, but also maintain PC Pursuit for the mail connectivity which I want to keep. That's the best business decision given the options. -- Karl Swartz |UUCP {ames,lll-winken}!pacbell!ditka!kls 1-505/672-3113 |Internet kls@ebnextk.slac.stanford.edu 1-408/223-1308 |BIX kswartz "I never let my schooling get in the way of my education." (Twain)