Xref: utzoo news.sysadmin:2049 news.admin:4501
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!hp4nl!oce-rd1!fs1-cg!teus
From: teus@fs1-cg.oce.nl (Teus Hagen)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin,news.admin
Subject: Re: i2ack request for news/email supply connection
Message-ID: <1035@oce-rd1.oce.nl>
Date: 16 Jan 89 13:32:43 GMT
References: <1219@altger.UUCP> <361@skep2.ATT.COM> <1236@altger.UUCP>
Sender: news@oce-rd1.oce.nl
Reply-To: teus@oce.nl (Teus Hagen)
Organization: EUUG
Lines: 40

The news costs in Europe, and students cannot afford news in Europe:
	Transport of data over an ocean costs money. The way to make news available
	to as many as possble readers in Europe is either sharing the (PTT) costs,
	or have someone fully pay for it. The last solution: nobody has stand up
	to do it (in the past DEC and Philips did it, thanks).
	So we have the first: sharing of transport costs.
	This is a very riscy situation: ie if someone does gets it cheaper via
	other routes initially, and will supply others, he will cause a snowball
	running of cheap intermediate news, destroy the current situation,
	end finally end up in the same situation of EUnet news: more costs.
	Sites will jump from one snowball to the other..., creating problematic
	situations for existing service providers in the intermediate time.

	So think carefully if one will try to start such connections.

At this moment the costs for news articles consists of three basics:
1)US link costs (because of sharing the costs and cheap bulk connection the costs is
  quite low) from Us to European central node.
  Cost is dependent to the amount of European news subscribers. So really very low costs.
2)costs from European central node to the national backbone.
  Costs are rather low, as divided by national news subscribers.
3)costs from national backbone to the news subscriber. This is the main costs.

What you see is that due to the large amount of subscribers costs are basically
caused by the national siruation. For i2ack it means: get as many as possible
subscribers hooked up to the national italian backbone!
And your costs will be lower as they can be done now (do not expect that others will
carry your subscription costs for a longer period!).
Or do not parasitize on European news subscribers.

The same rules apply for email. As currently rented lines are used for
some connections (eg US-Europe). So with fixed prices, email transport costs are
shared as well.

I hope I've explained why I, personally will not honor such a connection request.

teus hagen
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