Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!yale!bunker!stpstn!aad
From: aad@stpstn.UUCP (Anthony A. Datri)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: uunet, billing, overload ?
Message-ID: <1951@stpstn.UUCP>
Date: 3 Aug 88 00:43:27 GMT
References: <31240@philabs.Philips.Com> <379@uport.UUCP> <10352@ncc.Nexus.CA> <1917@stpstn.UUCP> <1988Jul28.165953.6782@utzoo.uucp>
Reply-To: aad@stpstn.UUCP (Anthony A. Datri)
Organization: The Stepstone Corporation, Sandy Hook, CT
Lines: 34


  The information that uunet sent me doesn't say anything about volume
charges, it just lists various connect time rates, down to $4/hour off-peak
for Tymmnet, ....  I'm not familiar with tymnet -- I just figured it was like
Telenet where the remote host pays for it.  I'd like to connect to uunet for
reliability and ease of routing.  We currently pay $200 a month for a line
from the exchange where our primary feed is.  If calling via tymnet with our
existing 2400 baud vadic is cheaper than that, then everyone's happy.  We only
keep a subset of groups since we have no need/desire for the others, and
aren't the only feed for anyone else.  I'd like to get rid of that $200 a
month phone line, and the uunet document I got says:

  "At 2400 bps via Tymnet, a full news feed would cost about $190 per month in
connect time" I figured that since we only get a fraction of the groups, that
the $30 a month plus the connect time would be < $200 a month, with increased
reliability and ease of routing.  Now that I see that many people use
Trailblazers and experience savings, I'm going to have to take the posted
costs for groups and add them up, and see what looks cheaper for us.  I don't
know that I could get the company to spend the $$ for a Trailblazer only on
the promise of eventual recovery of the cost.  I also have to dig in and
discover phone costs from here to uunet.  Our voice lines have some sort of
auto-selection for which carrier is cheapest; I don't think that's on on our
data lines.  The discussion of TB's that I've seen seems to indicate that
they're quite good on non-perfect lines, and I interpolate this to mean that
they should work fine with MCI, etc...  Our regional phone company is SNET.

I welcome any and all advice, even if it's just "get a TB".  As far as I can
tell, a once or twice a night poll would be just fine.  If we need to get mail
in or out in a hurry, we can send it to a secondary feed.
-- 
@disclaimer(Any concepts or opinions above are entirely mine, not those of my
	    employer, my GIGI, or my 11/34)
beak is								  beak is not
Anthony A. Datri,SysAdmin,StepstoneCorporation,stpstn!aad