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From: phil@amdcad.UUCP (Phil Ngai)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac,net.micro.amiga,net.news.group
Subject: Re: commercialism and net.micro.amiga going the way of .mac
Message-ID: <5690@amdcad.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 3-Nov-85 00:24:07 EST
Article-I.D.: amdcad.5690
Posted: Sun Nov  3 00:24:07 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 3-Nov-85 14:13:32 EST
References: <477@spice.cs.cmu.edu> <701@h-sc1.UUCP>
Reply-To: phil@amdcad.UUCP (Phil Ngai)
Organization: AMD, Sunnyvale, California
Lines: 24
Xref: linus net.micro.mac:3251 net.micro.amiga:4478 net.news.group:3561

In article <701@h-sc1.UUCP> breuel@h-sc1.UUCP (thomas breuel) writes:
>I believe that ultimately the concept of backbone sites is wrong, or
>that at the very least the layout of their connections is completely wrong.
>There is no reason why the USENET part of a backbone site with n
>connections should have a higher phone bill than any other site with
>n connections.

The reason backbones have such large phone bills is because they have
a lot of long distance news feeds in addition to the six or so local
news feeds. If everyone had only local news feeds, there would be
many areas isolated from each other. In California, for example,
there's no way to reach LA from SF without a long distance call.
Even if you were willing to route it through as many inbetween sites
as needed, there aren't enough to form a local call only chain.

The backbone concept also holds down the propagation delay. It's bad
now but it would be much worse without the backbones.
-- 
 The number of California lottery tickets sold is greater than
 the number of people in the United States of America.

 Phil Ngai +1 408 749-5720
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