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From: rob@europa.inmos.co.uk (Robin Pickering)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: EUnet, unido and USENET
Message-ID: <1714@brwa.inmos.co.uk>
Date: 26 Jul 89 09:47:12 GMT
References: <1989Jul18.121524.15171@coms.axis.fr> <8276@bsu-cs.bsu.edu> <1989Jul20.102927.26127@coms.axis.fr> <570.24C7A4BC@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us>
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Reply-To: rob@inmos.co.uk (Robin Pickering)
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In article <570.24C7A4BC@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us> mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us writes:
>
>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. 

This sounds like a nice idea but in reality I doubt it would work. Most
[USENET | Eunet] sites tend to be either Academic or Corporate R&D.

Neither of these kinds of site tend to be set up to charge for services (i.e.
USENET feeds). Speaking personally it is easy to get my boss to sign off a bill
for around $600 every three months. It would be practically impossible to get
the infrastructure in place to start charging fed sites etc.

The reason that unido is so expensive is that the folks in Germany seem to 
*want* a star network for news. Thus all of the machine resources to feed 
the whole of the coutry must be located centrally and paid for out of
subscriptions. It would appear that the major part of the subscriptions paid
in Germany is not the actual shared cost of the Atlantic feed, but rather
resource cost to the University of Dortmund.

In the UK I suspect that one of the reasons news is cheaper is that the
national backbone ukc *refuses* to feed leaf nodes (for news at least). 
Only nodes which undertake to feed a large number of downstream sites
get a direct feed, but all nodes pay the same (~$110/Month). Thus ukc
doesn't need as much machine/comms/human resources to support news
and news is therefore cheaper. (This is not the whole picture because the UK
mail network does tend to be fairly star shaped, and other factors such
as number of sites affect costs in the UK too)

If instead of spending large amounts of money upgrading their kit at the
expense of subscribers, unido were to admit that they had limited resources
and encourage the network to become more star shaped, I am sure costs could
be brought down. Sites being faced with a simple choice - enjoying the
benefits of close backbone connectivity at the (small) cost of feeding a
few other sites or becoming a leaf node with no machine cost.

 Rob Pickering
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