Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!husc6!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!ames!claris!apple!epimass!jbuck
From: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: "NNTP has had a number of very bad effects on the net..."
Message-ID: <2263@epimass.EPI.COM>
Date: 5 Jul 88 18:13:55 GMT
References: <4244@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu>
Reply-To: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck)
Organization: Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, CA
Lines: 48
Bob Webber's gripes about NNTP:
>
> 1) It has greatly decreased the response time of the net.
It's a matter of taste whether that is a problem.
> This has encouraged the use of news for idle chat rather than using mail
> for same.
The main reason here is because of the unreliability of mail these
days, not NNTP.
> 2) It messes up the economics of the net. Cross country communications
> costs are now no-charge for a number of sites.
That's been true all along; quite a few of the long-distance net
hops were always somebody's fixed-cost leased line.
> The impact on the arpanet
> being one example of this -- although it is difficult to separate
> out all the factors leading up to the current arpanet disintegration.
The Arpanet disintegration is easy to understand: insufficient
bandwidth. Hell, about ten PCs pumping data full blast can use up
all available bandwidth. To the extent that mailing lists become
newsgroups, NNTP should decrease traffic.
> 3) It has increased the centralization of the backbone.
This is flat-out wrong. It LESSENS the clout of the backbone. Most
long distance NNTP traffic is by NON-backbone machines. Every single
site on the official US backbone, other than UUNET (which really is vital),
could quit, and thanks to NNTP, we could rebuild the whole thing in a
couple of weeks (except for a few sparsely populated areas), since low-cost
replacements can quickly be found. Whiny backbone admins can now
politely be told, "Thank you for all the contributions you've made in
the past, but if you can no longer tolerate the problems, the net can
get along just fine without you."
For example, rutgers,...decwrl, decvax all interconnect
> over non-charge communication networks. Meaning that most of the
> link restrictions on the US backbone map are software.
The US backbone map has almost nothing to do with the way news
actually flows within the US.
--
- Joe Buck {uunet,ucbvax,pyramid,}!epimass.epi.com!jbuck
jbuck@epimass.epi.com Old Arpa mailers: jbuck%epimass.epi.com@uunet.uu.net
If you leave your fate in the hands of the gods, don't be
surprised if they have a few grins at your expense. - Tom Robbins