Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!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: 18 Jan 91 15:28:45 GMT Expires: 31 Dec 91 23:00:00 GMT References: <1948@odin.cs.hw.ac.uk> <3938@stl.stc.co.uk> <1991Jan16.204326@axion.bt.co.uk> Sender: cho@aber-cs.UUCP Organization: Coleg Prifysgol Cymru Lines: 66 Nntp-Posting-Host: teachk In-reply-to: ntitley@axion.bt.co.uk's message of 16 Jan 91 20:43:26 GMT On 16 Jan 91 20:43:26 GMT, ntitley@axion.bt.co.uk (Nigel Titley) said: ntitley> I do not have, and never have had cause to complain at UKCs ntitley> charging. I feel that it is cheap at the price. BT may afford to feel that it is cheap. Oh yes. I am still perplexed that for some reason the UKC overheads are over ten times *their* communication costs. Explanation: some say that UKC's yearly budget is over #250,000; the cost of fetching News (say something between 500MB-1GB per year depending on what you want to include) from UUNET by TrailBlazer is, depending on compression and other factors, well under #10-20,000 (approx. 1,000 chars second, depending on compression 250-500MB per year transferred, about 7,000 minutes on the phone per year at worst); it would quite a bit cheaper if the USA site were calling and then reimbursed for the AT&T bills, because the price per minute from the other side of the Pond is much lower. As to e-mail, I would be exceedingly surprised if e-mail to/from the UK commercial sites (the academic ones use the subsidized Internet gateway) reached a volume comparable to that of News; while we are discussing the News here, the #250,000 mentioned above include mail. Now I am prepared to believe that mail has greater fixed costs than News, but it probably has much smaller communication costs, because of possibly lower volume. I'd like to see the traffic statistics and the budgets of UKC vs. those of uk.ac.nsfnet-relay and UUNET; I surmise that it would be instructive. Note that the cost of getting News from the USA is *shared* with every other country in Europe, so that probably the #10,000-20,000 above have to be scaled significantly. All in all I think that the transmission costs of UKC are well under #20,000 (if not, they are insane). Their total budget is ten times that, at least. Uhmmm. Uhmmmmm. Do they provide a value added News "service", apart from being a pipe between UUNET and the first echelon of News sites in the UK? Not that I am aware of. They are just a conduit with an overhead of the order of 1000% overhead. Impressive. Back to the BT situation: they get their News feed from UKC and it is redistributed, out of their good will, to 22 sites, each of whom pays UKC (not BT!) their #600 per annum standing charge for News. If BT got the feed direct from UUNET, instead of via mcsun and ukc, or even from one of the several sites in the USA that would be happy to feed direct an European site (I have received some generous offers), they would be spending the same or less money, and they would be able to redistribute News for *free* to other sites in this country, or to charge much less than UKC and still recover their money. Now you say: but hidden here are the costs BT bears to redistribute News internally and externally, like support staff time and machine resources. Yes, but BT evidently are prepared to bear those costs for their own use of News, and probably passing it on may be a bother but probably just a little extra. USENET spirit! "I carry your traffic, you carry my traffic", and some are more generous than others. UKC make the overheads explicit, by having the rest of the UK pay for their support staff and machine resources, and fairly lavish ones at that (some largish CS departments would love to be able to afford three full time support people PLUS clerical staff for running their *dozens* of workstations and servers!). -- 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