From: utzoo!decvax!decwrl!sun!megatest!fortune!hpda!ld
Newsgroups: net.followup
Title: Re: people who need mail paths - (~nf)
Article-I.D.: hpda.380
Posted: Fri Mar 25 12:46:01 1983
Received: Sun Mar 27 06:08:12 1983


    Wake up friends.  Some guy just said that some sites carry the bulk of
    netnews traffic.  He mentioned decvax and ucbvax.  Maybe DEC has a
    couple of USENET machines, maybe UCB has a dozen.  Uhm, excuse me.
    There's this company called Bell Telephone Laboratories which has
    HUNDREDS of machines on the net, and BTL forwards more mail and news
    than even (!) decvax.  By far.  I don't want to hear some college kid
    saying "why shouldn't they, it's all telco revenue anyway?"  Telco
    revenue doesn't get credited to our BTL organizations, but our
    telephone bills get taken out of BTL budgets.

    Maybe I'm a little crabby this early in the morning, but I just can't
    understand how senseless some people can be.

            Andy Tannenbaum   Bell Labs  Whippany, NJ   (201) 386-6491

Sorry Andy, BTL may forward more news and mail than any other  en-
tity,  but  it  appears  to be forwarding only within Ma-Bell.  Of
course this would be true, since there are more  Bell  sites  than
outsiders.   But then, installing a new Bell site do not cost real
licensing fees (hence the proliferation) and they  have  been  in-
stalling sites longer than any other group.

When the statement was made that `some sites  carry  the  bulk  of
netnews  traffic',  he  was referring to carrying it long distance
(expensive phone charges).  I extracted all the `From:'  lines  in
net.general  (we keep files 2 weeks) and did a little massaging to
see who sends news across the US.  Here are the results:

articles        connection

  29            decwrl!decvax
   4            hplabs!hao*
  14            hplabs!hao!seismo
  11            sri-unix!cca
   4            ucbvax:decvax

    *I included this connection because it represents a connection between the
    western 1/3 of the US.  Of course, I am biased, so take it with a grain
    of salt.  I happen to know that there is a major WE site in Denver.

While it is true that BTL may be spending a fortune mailing to it-
self,  we  in  the  real  world do not particularly care what it's
internal financial difficulties are.  I will  not  bore  you  with
HP's  internal  cost  transfers (often called funny money).  It is
not a matter of how many machines are forwarding  news,  it  is  a
matter of how far any single jump is.

Of course it costs the Bell System money even for them to  make  a
long  distance  call  (they  cannot generate `real' revenue on the
line if it is in use by Bell).  So it is hardly fair to  say  that
they  have  the  equipment to make free cross country connections.
However ... they are in a position to prod their communication en-
gineers to solve the problem of making data transfer more cost ef-
fective by improving the performance of their system  and  (heaven
forbid)  lowering  the  long distance tariffs.  This does not mean
that they can EASILY convince the engineers to make such a change,
I  know  how  burocracies  are.   It just means that they are in a
BETTER position than I am (or any other non-Bell person).

                Thanks for reading my senseless babble,
                Larry Dwyer
                Hewlett Packard Co.
                ucbvax!hpda!ld

PS: Thank you DEC for decwrl!decvax.