dmcanzi@watdcsu.UUCP (David Canzi) (12/02/85)
It costs about 40 cents Canadian, or 30 cents American, to transmit a 100-line article once by long distance. That's from here (Kitchener) to L. A., late at night, at 1200 baud, with no compression. How much it costs to transmit the article everywhere depends on how many long distance calls it takes to reach the entire network. Supposing it takes 50 calls, at an average of 2/3 of the Kitchener-to-L.A. cost, it would cost about $10 American to send that article. The article headers would add about a dollar to the cost. This guesstimate is based on many assumptions, the most questionable of which are that it takes only 50 long distance phone calls to get an article to the entire network, that the phone rates in the rest of the world are roughly the same as Canadian phone rates, that no text compression is used on the transmitted articles, that the phone costs dominate all other costs, and that articles contain an average of 60 bytes per line. As 2400 baud modems become more common, the cost will be halved. If anybody can tell me how far off from reality my assumptions are, I would appreciate it. -- David Canzi "But lo! men have become the tools of their tools." -- Henry David Thoreau
dmcanzi@watdcsu.UUCP (David Canzi) (12/18/85)
I've been informed via mail that the late-night long distance phone rates in the U. S. are 20 cents per minute or less. This is cheaper than in Canada, where the rates are about 24 cents or *more*. (Both figures in American cents.) This would reduce my estimate of the cost of a 100 line article from $10 to maybe $7-$8, and that's still a pessimistic estimate. -- David Canzi Law of the Yukon: Only the lead dog gets a change of scenery.