Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!sharkey!oxtrap!mudos!mju
From: mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us (Marc Unangst)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: EUnet, unido and USENET
Message-ID: <570.24C7A4BC@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us>
Date: 21 Jul 89 19:03:33 GMT
References: <1989Jul18.121524.15171@coms.axis.fr> <8276@bsu-cs.bsu.edu> <1989Jul20.102927.26127@coms.axis.fr>
Reply-To: mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us
Organization: A neat desk is a sign of a crazy person.
Lines: 50

In article <1989Jul20.102927.26127@coms.axis.fr>, philip@coms.axis.fr (Philip Peake) writes:
 >Ok, expressed as simply as I can express it:
 >
 >We, us, EUnet members can be considered as a group of people who have
 >clubbed together to spread the exhorbitant telecoms costs for news between
 >us.
 >
 >Ok so far ?
 >
 >Now, along come other people, who say "We don't want to join your club,
 >we don't want to contribute to your costs - we just insist that you give
 >us all this lovely news that you have paid the transport costs for."

WRONG.  Here is what Rahul said, "as simply as I can express it":

Let's say that it costs $10,000/month to ship the full news distribution
across the pond to unido.  Let's also say that you have 10 sites that
feed directly off unido.  You should charge each of those 10 sites 
$1,000/month for their newsfeeds.  Now, let's say that site A, which
gets its feed off unido, can get 9 other sites to feed off it.  That
means that site A can charge each of those 9 sites $100/month, and
it pays $100/month.  Site A1, who gets a feed off site A and pays
$100/month for this, feeds three other sites.  This means that those
three other sites only have to pay $25/month, with site A1 also chipping
in $25/month towards the $100/month that it owes site A.

So, at the end of every month, site A owes unido $1,000 for their newsfeed.
However, since site A is feeding 9 other sites and charging each of them
$100 for their feed; this means that site A only has to come up with another
$100 to make $1,000.  And, since site A1 is charging three other sites
$25/month for their feeds, that means that site A1 only has to come up
with another $25 to make the $100 that it owes site A.  unido doesn't
have to know anything about this, other than the routing info to get
the mail where it's going.  unido only knows that it gets $10,000 every
month to subsidize their costs.  They don't know that there are
some sites, three levels down, that only pay $25/month for news; they
don't have to.  They handle collection from the top-level sites that
they feed, in turn, the top-level sites handle collection from the
second-level sites that they feed, and so on.  This rate structure
makes it very cheap to get news on your personal machine if you
are four or five steps down the ladder: You could end up paying
only about $5 or so a month for a full newsfeed, or you might even get
it for free!

--  
Marc Unangst
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