Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!dcl-cs!aber-cs!athene!pcg From: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) Newsgroups: uk.misc,comp.mail.misc Subject: Re: UKC and mail prices Message-ID: Date: 12 Jan 91 19:41:57 GMT References: <1991Jan7.204116.7978@cns.umist.ac.uk> <1991Jan8.180645.2690@robobar.co.uk> Sender: cho@aber-cs.UUCP Organization: Coleg Prifysgol Cymru Lines: 42 Nntp-Posting-Host: teachk In-reply-to: igb@fulcrum.bt.co.uk's message of 9 Jan 91 12:11:06 GMT Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.55.4 of Thu Nov 23 1989 on athene (berkeley-unix) On 9 Jan 91 12:11:06 GMT, igb@fulcrum.bt.co.uk (Ian G Batten) said: igb> We pay ``the right amount''. Our fees to Kent are around 20 grand igb> a year. I have people reading from another site over nntp, and we igb> pay the extra whatever for them. If you really meant *twenty* (instead of *two*, and a spurious zero) thousand pounds per year, you are insane :-). Getting a full news feed from UUNET by trailbalzer on British Telecom international lines costs less than half that sum (and you *are* BT!), and if you used Mercury :-) instead it would be even lower. You could cut your costs in half and then pass on News to the rest of the UK for free. Please do not reply "but UKC provides me with a service", because this is not true. You have to do all the work yourself, UKC only sells you the right to receive a copy of their news. Period. A pure byte stream. In case you are paying two and not twenty thousand pounds per year, it is still a sizable percentage of the cost of fetching news from UUNET, or any other USa backbone site, by TrailBlazer. You band with two or three sites like you and everybody will bless you. Unless I am totally wrong, the UKC role as providers of news is strictly to receive it from the EUnet backbone and redistribute it, a task that every site that cares to be a feed does. Unless I am totally wrong, UKC is not alone in the UK as a site that feeds many others. Uhmmmm. Let me think... How much is the Computer Board paying UKC to get news from the EUnet backbone? More or less than the cost of a TrailBlazer feed from UUNET? I suspect that any academic site might well submit a *much* lower bid by just getting a feed from UUNET, *without otherwise changing anything of their work*. I still haven't found out what they put into the water in Aberystwyth... -- Piercarlo Grandi | ARPA: pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk