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Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site watdcsu.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!watnot!watdcsu!dmcanzi
From: dmcanzi@watdcsu.UUCP (David Canzi)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: How much it costs, *very* roughly.
Message-ID: <1937@watdcsu.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 2-Dec-85 01:42:09 EST
Article-I.D.: watdcsu.1937
Posted: Mon Dec  2 01:42:09 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 3-Dec-85 07:28:07 EST
Distribution: net
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 24
Summary: About 3 or 4 bucks for this article.

It costs about 40 cents Canadian, or 30 cents American, to transmit a
100-line article once by long distance.  That's from here (Kitchener)
to L. A., late at night, at 1200 baud, with no compression.  How much
it costs to transmit the article everywhere depends on how many long
distance calls it takes to reach the entire network.  Supposing it
takes 50 calls, at an average of 2/3 of the Kitchener-to-L.A. cost, it
would cost about $10 American to send that article.  The article
headers would add about a dollar to the cost.

This guesstimate is based on many assumptions, the most questionable of
which are that it takes only 50 long distance phone calls to get an
article to the entire network, that the phone rates in the rest of the
world are roughly the same as Canadian phone rates, that no text
compression is used on the transmitted articles, that the phone costs
dominate all other costs, and that articles contain an average of 60
bytes per line.  As 2400 baud modems become more common, the cost will
be halved.

If anybody can tell me how far off from reality my assumptions are, I
would appreciate it.
-- 
David Canzi

"But lo! men have become the tools of their tools."  -- Henry David Thoreau