Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!mit-eddie!bloom-beacon!gatech!ncar!noao!mcdsun!mcdchg!clyde!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: How to eliminate the cost of over 1/5 (or more) of net traffic
Message-ID: <1616@looking.UUCP>
Date: 5 May 88 21:15:35 GMT
Organization: Looking Glass Software, Waterloo Ont.
Lines: 78

Last month there were 24 megs of binaries and sources and maps sent out on the
net, part of 120 megs of net traffic, or just over 20%.

It's actually a higher percentage, because many sites don't get the
full 120 megs, but source and binary groups get high propagation.
Note also that binaries, usually posted in ARC form, don't get nearly
the compression (even uuencoded) that text does.

Note that at my $10/K figure, which many call conservative, that's
around $240,000 spent shipping binaries and sources in one month alone!

Even at a $1 per K figure, which only assumes 40 long distance links for
the whole net, we're talking $24,000!

The important thing to remember is that binaries, sources and maps are
not urgent, time-critical stuff.

Thus I propose the creation of a "mail-net" underneath the net structure,
for binary, source and map groups.

If you have a large posting, you put it on disk in one of a number of
commonly understood formats that the folks at some central place (UUNET?)
can read.   They collect all the binaries, sources and maps for a week,
put them on another media and mail (yes, postal mail!) them out to
all subnets that want them.  We're talking 7 1 meg floppies here, or a tape.

7 megs with a telebit takes about 2.5 hours, which is about $20 at night,
so sites with telebits would still pick stuff up by phone, as long as
it was all batched at night.

The disks get mailed to the non-telebit sites, who then distribute it over
local calling and NNTP subnets with free links.  If there are 300 such
subnets, and disks get re-used, the cost is about $3/subnet, or around
$1000 per week (even cheaper with bulk mail), or $4000 per month.

That's $4000 per month, down from $240,000 per month.  

Some side notes:
	a) Even saving hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, I
	   doubt this will get done.  Hard to believe.

	b) Sending binaries on disk means that either the whole pack gets
	   there or nothing does.  No more "missing parts" and repostings.

	c) The phone transport mechanism is always there as a backup, since
	   the post office will probably lose a few of each shipment.
	
	d) This does require the personal loading of the disks into
	   one machine (any machine) in each subnet, so there is this
	   physical cost.  I'm sure there's one Xenix in almost every
	   subnet, so it should not be hard to find a compatible format.

	e) Bulk mail is slower, but the postage might only be as little as
	   30 cents per piece, plus a few dollars every month to return
	   all the disks for recycling.  You only need 200 pieces for
	   US bulk mail.

	f) Overnight service, at around $10/piece, would increase my cost
	   estimate to $12,000 per month, but provide higher reliability
	   and fast turnaround.  Still far less than $240,000.  You can
	   also probably get a deal on 300 pieces of overnight mail.

	g) One overnight shipment to Europe, and around $50, would save
	   a lot, I think.

	h) Canada and Europe would want to set up their own internal
	   distributions, quite possibly.

	i) Other high-volume, non urgent stuff could go in these packs,
	   at almost no incremental cost.  Sites that have shut off most
	   of the net could get it, if they wanted it.

The big barrier is somebody to administer this.  If the USENIX or UUNET
people can find it within their scope, it might actually fly.

Operations of BBSs might also want to use this.
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473