robert@fear.UUCP (Robert Plamondon) (12/13/85)
This has been mentioned before, but as far as I can tell it got
little attention.
Backbone sites can cut their phone bills caused by sending news to
non-backbone sites to zero by requiring the non-backbone sites to
poll for news. This way, the *recipient* pays, not the intermediate
site. Since the recipient is (in theory) the one who benefits from
news, he should be the one who pays.
With this system, the backbone sites only pay for their connections
to other backbone sites (and overhead, of course). Backbone sites
can share costs among themselves on the basis of "I poll on Mondays,
Wednesdays, and Fridays, and you poll on the other days," or "I poll
for these groups, and you send the rest."
This argument is orthogonal to the arguments about which groups are
trash and which are useful, and probably has less emotional content
(i.e., flame appeal) for that reason. But it's workable, isn't it?
--
Robert Plamondon
UUCP: {turtlevax, resonex, cae780}!weitek!robert
FidoNet: 10/624 robert plamondonearlw@pesnta.UUCP (Earl Wallace) (12/14/85)
In article <311@fear.UUCP> robert@fear.UUCP (Robert Plamondon) writes: > ... > Backbone sites can cut their phone bills caused by sending news to > non-backbone sites to zero by requiring the non-backbone sites to > poll for news. > ... Good idea, backbone sites that can tell their uucico to only send files of a particular grade can send mail ASAP to the remote site and hold back news files until the remote site polls. When the remote site polls, uucico allows the files to be picked up at the remote sites expense. Sites with 'everything goes' uucico are going to have a tough time preventing a remote site from looping a mail message thru the backbone site, thus causing a full blast transfer of news to occur at the expense of the backbone. We send mail ASAP, send area news like ba.* ASAP, compress/batch the rest of the news on hourly intervals. Some sites (like pesvc in New Jersey) are required to poll and pick up their news but we send mail to them ASAP and some newsgroups we send to them ASAP also (you should see my sys file :-).