bstempleton@watmath.UUCP (Brad Templeton) (04/14/84)
Noting recently posted figures of $1.70/Kpacket for telenet, with a charge of $1,140 per month just for 4800 baud connection, I pulled out my Datapac charge book and was rather surprised to find that you can pull off US communications cheaper from Canada in some situations. For a computer in a major Canadian city with a direct X.25 link to the net, the packet charge for a packet from telenet is only $1.85 Canadian which works out to $1.44 U.S. The monthly connect charge is $135 for 1200 baud and $270 for 4800 baud. $390 gets you 9600 baud. That includes the connection if you are in one of their service areas, which is just about any city. The holding time charge is 7.5 cents/minute any time, and that's better than any telenet rate (day or night) when converted to U.S funds of 5.85 cents/minute. The only catch is that interface packets to the USA must be priority packets and are limited to 128 bytes in size. Depending on the application, that could double your packet charges. But the difference in fixed costs of $1191 CDN buys you 644 kilopackets which is over 82 MILLION bytes. And if your packets are short, who knows. I don't know why they restrict to 128 packets, since I assume telenet is 256 bytes internally. The rates for TYMNET are more at $2.25 per kilopacket, but tymnet is not (I think) X.25 and the packetization can get very strange. So it turns out that any central x.25 node to distribute news is better in Toronto, even though most of what it sends would go to the USA! The reason for this is that Datapac has one big connection to Telenet, and it multiplexes the use (and cost) among all its customers. And Datapac is generally cheaper because it's run by the phone company, and has all the advantages that brings. -- Brad Templeton - Waterloo, Ont. (519) 886-7304