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From: lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: 2 questions and 2 answers about satellite netnews
Message-ID: <472@vortex.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 17-Dec-84 16:37:21 EST
Article-I.D.: vortex.472
Posted: Mon Dec 17 16:37:21 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 20-Dec-84 04:37:48 EST
Organization: Vortex Technology, Los Angeles
Lines: 58

There's no practical way to charge people for sending messages
INTO the stargate, and I think we've determined in past
discussions (in many of our opinions, anyway) that this could
discourage much useful information input and is a bad idea
anyway.  The "receiving" side can be controlled through addressing.

However, since there will always be human screening of materials,
both to sift out obvious repetitive messages and to meet
broadcast standards, the overall information content level of the material
broadcast should be quite a bit higher, overall, than we see on the
dialup network.  It might be best to call the material coming from
stargate the "'best' of Usenet" -- where a large number of netnews
screeners will help to ensure impartiality in the definition
of "best."  Or maybe "best" is the wrong word.  Perhaps "non-trash"
would be a more useful description.  Those who want to receive
all the other stuff will of course be free to do so by phone just
as they do now--no problem.
 
I've always assumed some sort of monthly fee for receiving the
data, simply because ultimately, the satellite time has to be paid for,
at least by the satellite carrier itself.  (Even if we're not
being charged the rates that a "normal" customer would pay for
sat time, it still is costing *something* to the carrier.)
There are also ongoing expenses, equipment (computer and satellite)
maintenance and changes, etc.  However, I visualize (for whatever my guess
at this point is worth) the fee at being no more than about 
$30/month, and maybe even less.  These are guesstimates of
course, but as I keep emphasizing we are only an experiment
now and not a production system.  The satellite carrier is NOT
going to keep giving us everything completely for free forever!
And what's wrong with them making some money on the operation?
They're going along with this purely on speculation when nobody
else would touch it.  Many Usenet sites are sending hundreds of
dollars a month to long distance services for their netnews phone
calls now -- and those services are certainly making money on
those calls!  What's wrong with the satellite carrier making
a little money (and far less per site than the long distance
services do!) instead, especially when they've taken most of the risk.

I think if you polled the Usenet sites and asked them how much
they spent on netnews, you'd find that most spend far more
than $30/month on netnews phone calls -- some more than 10 or 20 times
that a month.  And the amounts are going up rapidly.
If some people's management feel better spending
$600/month for netnews phone calls than $30 month for a 
netnews cable-delivered service fee, then there is little I can
say, other than that there's a lot of pretty narrow-minded management
floating around.  Such sites can keep spending their money
on phone calls and get netnews the current way.

Oh yes, about the netnews flow -- the WHOLE POINT of the buffering
board I keep talking about is that IT would handle the mass of
data flowing in from the decoder and pick out the articles of
interest, only feeding THOSE to the mainframe.  It would be handling
error correction and other functions as well.  That's why this
board is such an important part of the overall system.

--Lauren--