Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version VT1.00C 11/1/84; site vortex.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxt!mhuxj!houxm!whuxlm!harpo!decvax!vortex!lauren 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--