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From: blarson@usc-oberon.UUCP (Bob Larson)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: Strange news article path(s)
Message-ID: <320@usc-oberon.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 9-May-86 02:32:30 EDT
Article-I.D.: usc-ober.320
Posted: Fri May  9 02:32:30 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 10-May-86 06:27:07 EDT
References: <526@gould9.UUCP> <829@oliveb.UUCP>
Reply-To: blarson@usc-oberon.UUCP (Bob Larson)
Distribution: na
Organization: USC Computing Services, Los Angeles, CA
Lines: 28
Keywords: backbone, west coast
Xref: dcdwest ca.general:391 net.news:3162

I've noticed this phenominon also.  There are several things to
remember when optimising news paths, including:  cost is not
proportinal distance (besides phone company rate structure anomilies
(interstate vs. intrastate) there are things such as dedicated lines,
network connections (bitnet, arpanet), discounts to frequently called
areas, and pc-pursuit (sp?)), connection quality is not proportional
to distance, and usenet costs should preferably be shared.

Our news feed here at usc-oberon is bursty.  Often little news will
arive for several days then large batches will appear on a single day.
Once this there was almost nothing for a week, and then the weeks
worth of news came in over about 36 hours.  (Much of it winding up in
"junk" because it was over 2 weeks old.)  Our main news feed is
sdcrdcf, a "backbone" site, but we also exchange news with smegol and
uscvax (besides a bunch of local systems that have us as the only
newsfeed.)  The week long news lack was probably due to problems with
sdcrdcf, since the news that did come in seemed to come either from
smegol or trwrb!uscvax.

One thing I am considering is getting news running on my computer,
then maybe getting pc-pursuit and limited (to the newsgroups I want to
carry) newsfeeds in the cities it serves.  Several people taking this
aproach could vastly improve the connectivity of usenet for the groups
they are interested in.  
-- 
Bob Larson
Arpa: Blarson@Usc-Ecl.Arpa
Uucp: ihnp4!sdcrdcf!usc-oberon!blarson