Xref: utzoo news.misc:1881 news.admin:3775
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.misc,news.admin
Subject: Re: Some interesting news stats
Message-ID: <2206@looking.UUCP>
Date: 25 Oct 88 02:20:49 GMT
References: <5200@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 34

The reason that the net has been able to grow at the rate it has can
be found by examining similar jumps in technology.

When the net started, articles were sent unbatched, uncompressed and
over 1200 bps modems.  There were some sites on the net using 300 bps
modems.

Over time the following factors have come into play:

A) 14,000 bps modems - 11.6 factor improvement
B) Data compression - 2.2 factor improvement
C) Batching - 1.2 factor improvement
D) Long Distance Rate reductions - 1.3 factor improvement?

Total improvment: over 40 times!

Thus from late 1982 (100K/day) to today (4 megabytes/day) USENET has
actually not grown in terms of the cost to handle a link!  That's
pretty astounding.

If you add in other things, like PC-Persuit, X.25 links, Internet links,
Bitnet links, StarGate and, in the future, ISDN we see an actual
reduction!

Of course while the cost/link has stayed the same, the number of links
has increased, thus increasing the total cost of the net.  However, the
number of non-free links has not grown anywhere near the way the number
of sites has.  Most new sites are on free links -- things like SUNS,
personal workstations and at-home Unix boxes.

The one great cost that has gone up is the human time spent reading
waste of time postings.   (Like this one?)
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd.  --  Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473