Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!amdcad!cdr
From: cdr@amdcad.AMD.COM (Carl Rigney)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Disaster Planning
Keywords: doom naysayers death destruction
Message-ID: <27932@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Date: 27 Oct 89 16:54:35 GMT
References: <103@farcomp.UUCP> <35944@apple.Apple.COM> <14806@bfmny0.UU.NET>
Reply-To: cdr@amdcad.amd.com (Carl Rigney)
Distribution: na
Organization: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Sunnyvale, Ca.
Lines: 25

Innumeracy strikes again.

1) At its peak the PacBell phone system in the Bay area was switching 
1 million calls a minute.  "grep u.usa.ca.[024680] | wc -l" shows
517 sites.  Even assuming every site spent every minute on the phone
(far from true, since many of them are small), that's 0.05% load.

2) A minute of conversation is about a page of dialogue; call it
2 kilobytes.  A Trailblazer can send 2KB (compressed) in less than
a second.  Nearly a 100 to 1 reduction in phone bandwidth, plus MORE
IMPORTANTLY, as Chuq noted computers batch messages, and so many
messages are sent with one connection, reducing the amount of
phone switching required.

If you really want to have significant impact on disaster recovery
communications, buy them a UNIX box and some Trailblazer modems,
and let them get as many UUCP connections as possible.

Next subject.

--
Carl Rigney
cdr@amdcad.AMD.COM	{ames att decwrl pyramid sun uunet}!amdcad!cdr
MS 167; AMD; 901 Thompson Place; Box 3453; Sunnyvale, CA  94088
408-749-2453