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Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!uunet!ukma!gatech!spaf
From: spaf@gatech.edu (Gene Spafford)
Newsgroups: news.misc,news.software.b
Subject: Re: Bogus loud warning messages
Message-ID: <15752@gatech.gatech.edu>
Date: Sun, 31-May-87 18:11:37 EDT
Article-I.D.: gatech.15752
Posted: Sun May 31 18:11:37 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 2-Jun-87 03:17:35 EDT
References: <1216@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Reply-To: spaf@gatech.UUCP (Gene Spafford)
Organization: Software Engineering Research Center (SERC), Georgia Tech
Lines: 28
Xref: mnetor news.misc:495 news.software.b:642

In article <1216@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> garry@oak.cadif.cornell.edu writes:
>From a recent version of Pnews:
>
>> This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire
>> civilized world.  You message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of
>> dollars to send everywhere.  Please be sure you know what you are doing.
>
>Does this mean that someone is spending millions if not tens of millions
>of dollars per year to support 'soc.singles'?  

Yup.  Figure that only the 40 or so backbone sites have any cost
involved in transfer or storage of news.  Figure each soc.singles
article costs $.05 to store and forward.  Figure 5000 articles per year
(perhaps too conservative).  That means the backbone sites
(collectively) are paying $10000 per year for just that group.  Now
realize that the actual number of sites involved netwide with transfer
and storage costs is a lot closer to 10000 than 40, and that the per
article costs may actually be higher, on average.  Netwide, soc.singles
is possibly costing in the millions of dollars a year to support.

The nature of the net makes it difficult to get exact figures, but
by any reasonable estimates it makes sense to let people know it
costs real money *somewhere* to support all these bytes.
-- 
Gene Spafford
Software Engineering Research Center (SERC), Georgia Tech, Atlanta GA 30332
CSNet:	Spaf @ GATech		ARPA:	Spaf@gatech.EDU
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