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From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin
Subject: Re: Formalizing rules (Really the relevancy of the backbone)
Message-ID: <1532@looking.UUCP>
Date: 2 Apr 88 08:30:04 GMT
References: <61@ncar.ucar.edu> <47325@sun.uucp> <68@ncar.ucar.edu> <47472@sun.uucp> <5864@swan.ulowell.edu> <77@ncar.ucar.edu> <571@fig.bbn.com>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
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Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
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In fact, in an odd way it's Telebit Technologies that will probably
deal the end to the backbone concept, in combination with uunet type sites.

With a Telebit you can send the 70 megs of monthly news, compressed to
about 35 megs in about 7 hours.  I know that AT&T's reach out America
is $9/hour, that's $63/month, twice that for a double long distance feed.
That's to anywhere in the USA, once you fork out the $700 a backbone site
pays for one of those modems.

With Telenet PC-persuit, if you have it, it's $25 for the whole month
for everything.

Of course, backbone sites today carry a very large mail burden, but that
would change with wider distribution of long distance duties.

To me, it's amazing.  I remember how we used to talk about $100K phonebills
for decvax and how it would all come crumbling down for financial reasons.
It's astounding what technology has done.   Now the big cost in news
is not the physical cost, but the cost in time spent reading it.

[ Note that the above analysis is simplistic, not counting PC-persuit.
It assumes transmission only at night, and perfect batching for 100%
uucp efficiency.  If we cared, we could get that 100% efficiency, but it
just doesn't matter.  Even at only 50% efficiency it's no longer a major
bother if you use strictly telebits, which everybody isn't using yet. ]

[ This is not to belittle in any way the incredible contribution of dollars
that some backbone sites have made.  I still wonder how they did it. ]
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473