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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!princeton!astrovax!sjuvax!jss
From: jss@sjuvax.UUCP (J. Shapiro)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: Article with the most interesting path
Message-ID: <2489@sjuvax.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 29-Oct-85 17:43:22 EST
Article-I.D.: sjuvax.2489
Posted: Tue Oct 29 17:43:22 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 2-Nov-85 06:47:03 EST
References: <626@oliveb.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: Haverford College, Haverford, Pa.
Lines: 57

> I was examining news articles for length of path and came across an
> interesting one.  It follows the typical cross country path to get next
> door.  Amazingly all this cross country hopping only took 3 days.  Not
> bad except for the extra phone charges.
> 
> The interesting thing is the uucp path.  It starts out in OR, hops
> across the country thru UT, MD, VA, MA, NJ, IL, NY, and then cross
> country back to WA, back to OR, and then more reasonably down to CA.

Personally, I suspect that a lot of the cost of netnews occurs in just
this fashion.  Network links are cheap, but telephone lines aren't.  I
suspect that if we could get together a database of the kinds of links
people have and the BellTel Cost/Kilobyte, along with phone numbers
called, I suspect that we would find that there are a lot of duplicate
routings (which is not necessarily bad), but more important, we would
find that we could trivially encourage local sites to transmit to each
other.  The case above is a good case in point.

Since most of the billing seems to be by phone, it seems logical to
encourage that news travel over the most local connections.  One of
the original reasons for IHAVE/SENDME was that you could set up a
primary feed, compile an IHAVE list, ship it to a secondary feed site,
and get them to ship you whatever you didn't already have.  While the
three call cost is high if there is only a little news, it is well
worth it if we can save 2 hours at the cost of two short calls.

In short, I think it would make a lot of sense to reorganize the net
propagation in accordance with phone area code and exchange.  Does it
seem likely that people would be willing to do this, and if so, is it
worth my effort?  I suspect that we would find that in an awful lot
of cases, the long distance stuff could be made to run over already
existing internal networks which are not nearly saturated.  This would
take a load off of some of the backbone sites in terms of phone cost,
and would probably speed up overall propagation, because many more
sites would be willing to call on demand.  It would also make a lot of
billing people happy.  Last and best of all, it would make Ma Bell
very Unhappy -);

I am willing to try to write a script to compile this information from
the existing net map files, but it seems to me that in many cases
people have not given machine phone numbers, and therefore correlation
by phone area code and exchange will be very difficult

Can anybody think up a reasonable way of encourageing people to agree
to trying this?

Mail connections should be left alone, as companies have individual
reasons for doing this.

Jon Shapiro
Haverford College
-- 
Jonathan S. Shapiro
Haverford College

	"It doesn't compile pseudo code... What do you expect for fifty
		dollars?" - M. Tiemann