dick@ucsfcca.UUCP (Dick Karpinski) (05/08/86)
I was moved to contact Telenet about bulk discounts etc. by a net.usenix article requesting proposals for experimental projects. By all measures, the cheapest feed is clearly PC Pursuit at a mere $25 per month per feeder. I believe that they require that the purchaser of services be an individual, not a company. However, the availability of 13 hours/day of 1200 bps connection makes it cheap for an individual with their own Unix system to scarf up the megabyte or so of a full news feed and spit it out to at least two other sites each nite. Probably there are folks here who could arrange to automate most of the task. I believe that for now, the service is limited to local calls in 20 large cities across the country. Expansions of the area, but not the fee are said to be in the works. Would this idea help to contain the cost, system wide, of transmitting the news? For commercial sites without willing home Unix users, another avenue is potentially realizable for a large enough group of cooperating sites (about 100). At a guaranteed minimum usage of $5k per month, off hours Telenet time (6pm to 7am + weekends) can be purchased for about $1.17 per hour. The other end may need to have gear rented from Telenet such that the effective rate is about double. This permits a much wider range of locations from which and to which calls can be placed (compared to PC Pursuit). At saturation (four 1-megabyte feeds per port per nite) the cost (neglecting billing/charging hassles) of this system would be less than $200/mo/recipient. Would this idea help to contain the cost, system wide, of transmitting the news? I got tired of all the complaints about the high cost of keeping the net in operation and decided to try to do a little to change that for the better. However, I do not have much idea whether there are many US sites for whom these figures would represent much improvement. Do you? Please let me know if my naivete has caused me to overlook some obvious problem. Otherwise, please explain to me (or to the net?) what else is needed to improve the net.news costs, beyond banding together to employ one of these approaches. Stargate will, if all goes well, reduce the net.news transmission costs substantially, by using satelite broadcasting for a large fraction of the daily volume. Till then, and after then if news costs for the rest are still of concern, these approaches might have some value. Even if Stargate carried all the news, a large volume of mail could justify some of this. Any comments?? Dick -- Dick Karpinski Manager of Unix Services, UCSF Computer Center UUCP: ...!ucbvax!ucsfcgl!cca.ucsf!dick (415) 476-4529 (12-7) BITNET: dick@ucsfcca Compuserve: 70215,1277 Telemail: RKarpinski USPS: U-76 UCSF, San Francisco, CA 94143
lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (05/10/86)
Even if transmission, reception, storage and processing of news and similar materials were totally free (in a monetary sense) to all, the problems of quality and volume would still remain. Given the rate that new sites are joining the net, virtually any point-to-point communications medium could be saturated in pretty short order, even without the additional complication of other users also competing for bandwidth. Cost is but one factor in the overall picture. Point-to-point systems just don't scale up well--the sorts of communications required for netnews-type operations are much more suited to broadcast type technologies--which includes the satellite part of Stargate, of course. A satellite transponder can broadcast simultaneously to any number of receiving points, and reaches all active sites at the same time without the (sometimes very long) lags associated with point-to-point type communications. There is also the increasingly obvious point that fewer and fewer people have the time nor the inclination to wade through all the muck on many newsgroups at any price. The problems of moderation in the current net environment are due to a number of factors, only one of which is the time lags associated with the current network. The Stargate service will be addressing all of these factors and should be able to avoid these problems. I might mention at this point that the operational proposal for Stargate addresses both a variety of "netnews"-type services and mail services, using direct satellite reception, cable television reception, phone lines, and other transmission mediums, with an emphasis on the "broadcast"-oriented technologies where appropriate. The proposal will be presented to the Usenix board shortly, and I'll be speaking about the proposal and the overall status of Stargate at the Atlanta Usenix Conference next month. I hope that the community will find the project worthy of its support. --Lauren--
rick@seismo.CSS.GOV (Rick Adams) (05/11/86)
In the month of April, seismo sent over 1 GIGABYTE (1000 Megabytes) of mail and news with uucp. /usr/spool filled up 3 times. (/usr/spool is a 212 megabyte filesystem!) seismo will be heavily cutting back on uucp traffic in the next month or so. The phone charges are not really relevant. It's eating too much of a vax 11/780. ---rick