Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cdin-1!icdi10!fr From: fr@icdi10.UUCP (Fred Rump from home) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: Re: mail and news in Europe Message-ID: <330@icdi10.UUCP> Date: 3 Jul 89 01:01:05 GMT References: <786@redsox.bsw.com> <928@sering.cwi.nl> <573@axis.fr> <29859@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <4793@freja.diku.dk> Reply-To: fr@icdi10.UUCP (Fred Rump from home) Organization: From Home but normally @ Compudata Inc. Phila PA Lines: 63 Summary: Expires: Sender: Followup-To: Distribution: Keywords: In article <4793@freja.diku.dk> keld@freja.diku.dk (Keld J|rn Simonsen) writes: >People want a reliable service, and thus Eunet has evolved >to become more professional, as many of the backbones have >hired staff and their own machines dedicated to EUnet services. I don't think anybody is criticizing your backbone staffs or your professionalism. Or that somebody somewhere has to pay for their time. I believe the bone of contention is that the costs are so high that you'll never get the little guy involved. This, in turn, keeps your costs high because you can't share the cost with more sites. >Of cause you may be able to do things cheaper if you run >everything voluntarily and have free machines to your disposal, >but for how long will it last ? Remember decvax, ucbvax, seismo >and inhp4 ? The net has grown up and it is to big to run on >an voluntary basis, at least in Europe. >Danish IP/UUCP backbone Let me ask you how many sites you feed in Denmark? How many full news feeds, how many mail customers? Oh, you'll say you only have a small country, right? Ok, what's the population then? I have a little old 386 here with a 338MB disk. I feed about 10 sites locally. I have access to a full feed from 3 sites. I pay my own phone bill across the river (another state and higher charges). My main feed gets its feed from uunet mainly because they don't wish to impose on others (bpa or Bell of Pennsylvania and several other local sites). So, to be fair, as you would say, it costs about $250 (including phone delivery charges) to receive a good size feed from uunet. If everybody were to just take then bpa would shut its doors to like the sites you mentioned. My company has almost 200 customer clients receiving a selected news feed (end user type stuff) and E-mail all over the USA. We add about one a week. Most of these sites aren't even on the map as we serve as our own internal hub. We are but a small company. But there are thousands of us. This mostly possible because our telephone system discounts its charges dramatically after 11PM. So all this stuff goes on mostly at night. It costs only 20 or 30 cents to call 3000 miles across the country. How can all this be possible? It is called economies of scale. The more people that use a service that has a certain fixed cost anyway, the cheaper it gets for everyone. That is, unless you start making crazy rules about how this can't work! What few of us here see in Europe is a willingness to try something different. You seem so ademant about your professionalism and 'proper' procedures that the whole process of more information interchange seems to have gotten stuck with only a handful of users sharing inordinate costs. It seems that they like it that way just to keep the riff-raff out. Fred Rump -- This is my house. My castle will get started right after I finish with news. 26 Warren St. uucp: ...{bpa dsinc uunet}!cdin-1!icdi10!fr Beverly, NJ 08010 domain: fred@cdin-1.uu.net or icdi10!fr@cdin-1.uu.net 609-386-6846 "Freude... Alle Menschen werden Brueder..." - Schiller