Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: How to eliminate the cost of over 1/5 (or more) of net traffic
Message-ID: <1635@looking.UUCP>
Date: 12 May 88 04:03:35 GMT
References: <1616@looking.UUCP> <221@premise.ZONE1.COM>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 33

Indeed, there are commercial shareware/PD distribution organizatons that
sell PD disks from anywhere to 3.50 to $6 per disk.  It would be very
easy to convince these folks to catalog the various binaries sent here,
if they already don't, and arrange a deal for usenetters.

But they wouldn't be keen on binaries/sources for things they don't support,
since their support people wouldn't know how to answer questions on them,
and they probably wouldn't care for uucp maps, so a usenet organized
mailnet is possibly worth something.

Now a Telebit is nice because you get the cost down to about $4 per meg if
you do it at night.  You need 3 megs before a UPS overnight letter is
cheaper.

Anything less than a telebit and an overnight letter is cheaper than a meg.
With 4 megs a day, an overnight letter every two days would cost a lot less
and probably even *speed up* propagation on some things.

The smart thing to do would be to make two classes of news, namely urgent
and non-urgent.  Use the mailnet for the non-urgent, and the phones for
the urgent.

Only problem would be making sure people didn't abuse the "urgent"
distribution.  If you had to pay $5/K to post an urgent message, that would
do it, but there's no way to enforce that.

But right now, costs would drop a great deal if the binaries, sources,
map, talk and some other groups went to this form of distribution.

It's an irony that Stargate, which has the same costs no matter how many
people pick it up, has to be restricted due to broadcast rules.
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473