asente@Cascade.ARPA (11/05/85)
The major argument for discontinuing some of the more voluminous groups is the cost to backbone sites to transmit all the news. Has anyone investigated the technique of putting news on magnetic tape and Federal Express-ing it to other sites? Advantage: It is much cheaper! Discounting the cost of the tapes (which can be reused, after all), it costs less than $20 to Federal Express a tape. Even if you add in the cost of having someone manually mount the tape, I still think you win big. Disadvantages: Sending news now requires more manual intervention than it does now. News will take, on the whole, longer to propogate. Sites could decide which groups are sufficiently important to be sent by phone lines and which are unimportant enough to suffer an extra day's delivery time. I think this is an idea worth at least considering. -paul asente asente@Cascade.ARPA decwrl!Glacier!Cascade!asente Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes.
b2@magic.UUCP (Bryan Bingham) (11/08/85)
> The major argument for discontinuing some of the more voluminous > groups is the cost to backbone sites to transmit all the news. Has > anyone investigated the technique of putting news on magnetic tape > and Federal Express-ing it to other sites? Such a scheme is very unattractive because it requires manual work to be done by netnews administraters. And although it may indeed cost only about $20 to send a tape w/Fed. Xpress, one must also count the time the persons at either end have to take to load the tape, dump old messages off it, write new ones on, unload the tape, then repackage it for Fed. Xpress. Someone must also be responsible for deleting old messages on the tape -- this suggests that a ring of people would be required, the tapes would be tokens passing around the ring until it returned to the originator who would take old messages off the tape. What if the ring is broken? Paying for doing things this way may be a hassle for many. Its easy to hide netnews costs when one gets one bill for use of a single telephone line. Managers seem resigned to the fact that computers like to talk to each other for long periods of time. Thus we have been able to get away with passing huge amounts of traffic back and forth accross the country several times without money problems, until recently. A sudden jump in Federal Express costs, on the other hand, might cause some uncomfortable scrutinizing of the exact purpose for the luxury of using a rather expensive transport service instead of good old 4th class mail or parcel post. One might be able to convince middle-managers that that is cheaper than the alternative of paying a large phone bill, but they might say "is it cheaper than not doing it at all?" I'm not saying that there are no circumstances where tape transport would be appropriate -- Australia got its fix of netnews that way for a time, and if you're already sending tapes hither and yon for a research project or whatever, it probably will cost very very little to include a batch of news on the end of "real" data. As a standard mode of transport for the backbone though, I think tapes just won't cut it. I think that the only solution to the overload problem that doesn't involve newsgroup deletion is for the backbone to try, if humanly possible, to arrange minimum cost links, and to upgrade to the highest possible speed modems available. This would require them to settle on a standard model, such as the Telebit 10Kb modem, and then prove to their management that it would be cheaper to shell out for them now then to continue to send news using the 212's they bought as a cost-saving measure 3 years ago. "But this is only a stopgap!" people will say. I say "So what?" If most sites spend even a small amount of money and get 2.4Kb modems, their phones bill savings for netnews alone will cover the cost of the modem after a year or so, maybe less. b2 ihnp4!bellcore!b2 b2@bellcore.com "People yakkitty-yak all day, to pass the time of day, but Mr. Ed will never speak, unless he has something to say!"
campbell@maynard.UUCP (Larry Campbell) (11/09/85)
Has anyone thought about using GTE's "PC Pursuit" service? It's available
in 12 major metropolitan areas, and for only $25.00 per month gives unlimited
long distance data calling to any of the other areas. There are a couple
of restrictions -- there's a callback involved, and calls are limited to
one hour each -- but there's no limit on total hours per month. Seems like
it could save some backbone sites a *LOT* of money. (I recall someone posting
an article saying they called GTE to ask about heavy UUCP traffic, and they
were told GTE is not weeding out heavy commercial users. Yet.)
--
Larry Campbell decvax!genrad
The Boston Software Works, Inc. \
120 Fulton St. seismo!harvard!wjh12!maynard!campbell
Boston MA 02109 / /
ihnp4 cbosgd
ARPA: maynard.UUCP:campbell@harvard.ARPAmcb@styx.UUCP (Michael C. Berch) (11/22/85)
I think the key to keeping the net afloat under the increasing traffic
load is to explore ways of cooperatively cutting down transmission
costs. One of the reasons that the majority of news transport occurs
on 1200-baud telephone lines is that most sites already have dial-in
or dial-out modems, and telephone bills are often not separately
accounted for in an organization.
This has led to a topology that boggles the mind. Now that we seem to
be at the bursting point (although I personally don't agree with the
doom and gloom articles posted here recently) it might be time to look
at some collective organization and planning.
One approach is Stargate, and plenty has been written about that, so
it need not be treated here. Another is to attempt to replace the
costly, inefficient Usenet backbone with some more modern technology:
specifically, use of public data networks (PDNs) and, where appropriate,
leased lines for local traffic.
The backbone sites have huge phone bills because they receive/transmit
articles over long-distance telephone lines at a slow speed. Couldn't
some of this be replaced by use of PDNs and leased lines? I know that
cost-per-packet for short and medium-haul data transmission is at its
lowest point ever. The field is intensively competitive (with
bottlenecks, like the telcos), and many sites will not need additional
hardware.
The drawback is that you have to make a specific financial committment
to Usenet, buy the necessary hardware, install the necessary software,
and pay monthly charges that probably won't disappear in the
departmental budget. Not every site is going to be able to do that,
but it's the backbone sites and those who are one hop away that (by
definition) carry the most traffic. In the long run, it'll be MUCH
cheaper. Then there are the organizations that have existing internal
data networks -- can't these be used to a greater extent for news
transport?
At the lowest level, some sites will want to install dedicated lines
to their news neighbor(s). Wouldn't you rather have a 9600-bps
conditioned line to your (single) feed than deal with a huge phone
bill? They're not cheap, but neither is the existing situation.
Michael C. Berch
mcb@lll-tis-b.ARPA
{akgua,allegra,cbosgd,decwrl,dual,ihnp4,sun}!idi!styx!mcb