Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Geosat transmission of news
Message-ID: <3413@looking.on.ca>
Date: 1 Jun 89 05:49:58 GMT
References: <371@odi.ODI.COM> <3400@looking.on.ca> <3549@ddsw1.MCS.COM>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 53

In article <3549@ddsw1.MCS.COM> karl@ddsw1.UUCP (Karl Denninger) writes:
>
>You mean so they could continue to perpetuate the monopoly they held, and
>reap the revenue from same.

Stargate, as I understand it, had to compete in the free market that
exists for general newsfeeds.  I know of no monopoly they held or
tried to hold.  All they wanted to say was that those who took advantage
of the satellite transmission should all pay for it equally.

What was so bad about that?  Why, I wonder did people care about how
stuff they were posting was transmitted?  Why did it matter if those
who got it by downlink were required to pay if other people could get
it by other routes?   That's what a free market in net feeds, if you
want to call it that, is all about.  If Stargate really was cheaper,
people would go to it.  If it wasn't, nobody would bother and their
admonition not to feed wouldn't have meant anything.

What I was commenting on was the fact that people weren't satisfied to
let Stargate live or die through this system of free choice.  They
opposed it and put the share-right messages on their postings.

Consider the fact that I get netnews on my system.  I am fully allowed
to let it stop right here and be a leaf.  There is no requirement that I
share it, and nobody would think of making one!  Could somebody require
me to give out free accounts and free feeds?  Of course not.

Yet the message, "You may transmit this only if your recipients may" is
very similar to "you may transmit this to your system only if you don't
deny anybody access to it on your system."   The former was accepted, the
latter sounds silly.
>
>Actually, I worked in that industry, and I can't see how satellite
>technology is any cheaper to use now than it was two or so years back.  

Perhaps the Stargate folks were way out of line.  Could be.  But it's
my understanding that today a 2400 bps uplink is on the order of
$2,000 per month.  That's was the folks in Vancouver said they were
paying, I think.   I seem to recall UUNET saying that they run around
$50,000 per month of traffic there.    $2,000 per month for all of usenet
seems like a good bargain to me -- cheap enough that some people have
decided it's not even worth asking people to contribute.

A 2400 bps feed can send around 17 megs/day of solid data, that's 17
non-compressed megs sent twice based on 2:1 compression.   That's about
4 times today's usenet volume.  And that $2k/month is about the cost of
one fast internet link.   Usenet currently runs around 55 megs of compressed
data per month, and uunet charges around $2.80/megabyte (TB+ over wats line)

This is $192/month.  You could buy your downlink quickly at that rate,
particularly if you only wanted one downlink per local calling area.
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd.  --  Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473