Xref: utzoo news.admin:12728 comp.mail.uucp:6072 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wotan!moxie!sugar!peter From: peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: news.admin,comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: UUPSI's new rules Message-ID: <1991Mar13.124642.9441@sugar.hackercorp.com> Date: 13 Mar 91 12:46:42 GMT References: <1991Mar11.143824.24170@searchtech.com> <2517@sun13.scri.fsu.edu> <1991Mar12.134431.14294@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> Organization: Sugar Land Unix -- Houston, TX Lines: 59 In article <1991Mar12.134431.14294@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) writes: > Absolutely correct; they are trying to _force_ each customer that wants > to take advantage of this cheap feed to connect to them directly and > pay full freight Absolutely correct. So? They priced the cheap feed with the expectation that a reasonable percentage of the sites in an area would pay the $75 for a direct feed to UUPSI, to pay for the cost of the dedicated links. When it became obvious that that wasn't going to happen, they changed the rules to further encourage a direct UUPSI connect. If they don't do something like this, the limiting case comes when each area and its expensive dedicated line serves a single UUPSI customer who then feeds all the other sites. This is a perennial problem with Usenet, where whever can ship the most bits the fastest becomes "the" feed for an area, the redundant feeds drop off, and when "the" feed goes everyone panics. It's happened twice in the Houston-Dallas-Austin area that I can remember. And people still don't seem to be learning. > Instead of this reasonable approach, they have chosen to dictate to > their customers the type of connectivity those customers will display > across the customer-UUPSI interface, which frankly is none of their > damned business. No, they're dictating whose traffic will go over the link. It's no different from (and, if anything, more liberal than) any commercial network. I get a flat rate from SWBell but, common carrier status notwitstanding, I'm sure they'd drop me in a minute if I tried running wires into my neighbors' apartments and set up some sort of party-line mechanism. > Since they are selling connectivity rather than bandwidth, what their > product really amounts to for the not-terribly-clever-about-news-software > customer is a perpetual bondage into leafhood. No it *doesn't*. There is absolutely no reason a UUPSI customer has to be a leaf. I *know* you know better than that, Kent. I have explained several times in Email and on the net how to set up a UUPSI feed so you can have a well connected site and still take advantage of their service. Anyone with the brains to set up C News should be able to do it. As you pointed out, the reverse flow is *cheap*. Surely one site in an area can afford the long-distance calls to get news and mail back to any of dozens of well-connected sites that are happy to take them. If not, you can all get together and order a UUNET connect. Or depend on the existing usenet flood algorithm to get the message back. That's what you seem to be pushing for: for UUPSI to get out of the pool and let us go back to the uncertanties of riding in the backs of big sites. > This is bad juju for the net, period. No, Kent. Helping people get off the tax-subsidised backs of universities and the government, and quit hanging on the uncertain arms of friendly system administrators in a hostile commercial environment, is good juju. Period. -- Peter da Silva. `-_-' .