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From: gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin,comp.mail.uucp,comp.dcom.modems
Subject: uunet "3 minutes minimum" impacts Telebit users
Message-ID: <4581@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 13 May 88 12:03:55 GMT
Organization: Grasshopper Group in San Francisco
Lines: 43

My last bill from uunet was for about 2 to 4 times as many minutes
as I could account for from my system login records.  I checked
this with Rick and he told me, for the first time, that uunet
has a 3 minute minimum charge, applied for both incoming and outgoing
calls.

Since we use a Telebit modem, the breakdown of calls in April was:

calls minutes (from "last Uuunet" output)
 139 00
  87 01
  19 02
   3 03
   2 04
   3 05
   4 06
   1 07
   2 08
   1 10

The above adds to 214 minutes; if the 0-minute calls are billed as
1-minute calls, the sum is 353 minutes.  This about half of the 756
minutes we were billed for outgoing calls.

Note that billing us for 3 minutes for each call is overcharging
for 99% of the calls.

I recommend that other Telebit uunet users change your dialing patterns
to avoid these overcharges.  There is no easy way to get uunet to
only call you when it has 3 minutes' worth of data to send (or,
say, once a day for less traffic than that), so I have switched back
to polling uunet twice a day.  That way I'm only charged for 6 minutes/day
unless I have more than about 400K of traffic that day.

In April my SYSLOG shows that we moved 5,537,547 bytes with uunet.
Since we were billed about $109 for this (not including the $30/mo
membership fee), it cost about $19/meg.  On Telebits, a meg moves in
about 15 minutes, so it should cost about $2 at $8/hr.  There is
certainly more overhead when moving smaller files around, but a factor
of 10 is too much!
-- 
John Gilmore  {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu        gnu@toad.com
"Use the Source, Luke...."