Again ... What is it going to COST?????

Henry Spencer henry at utzoo.UUCP
Sun Jul 13 11:20:38 AEST 1986


(Disclaimer:  I have no official affiliation with Stargate.)

> 	1) As a commercial service stargate based news traffic WILL cost
> 	MORE money. The fee for most sites will be larger than the current
> 	costs to access news via uucp based usenet. This is a simple deduction
> 	since most sites currently recieve news free from another local site.

If you follow the paths far enough, you find a site which is paying to get
the stuff in.  Probably paying quite a bit.  As one of those sites, I have
little sympathy for freeloaders.  Did you really expect that it would stay
free forever?  Looking at it another way, if your local bill-paying site
gives it to you free now, why should they cut it off?

>	2) As a commercial service stargate based news traffic CANNOT be
>	rebroadcast to ANY OTHER machine or site without paying the fee for
>	that site as well...

I would assume that Stargate would permit local rebroadcasting.  If they
don't, a lot of people are going to be very unhappy.  I'm not an expert on
the legalities of this sort of thing, but I would assume that Stargate can
waive fees for subsequent machines in the area if they want to.

>	...the current community ASSUMES free access and distribution.

I assure you that there is nothing free about it.  Ask any backbone site.

>	This is a simple
>	deduction since the news link is planned to be scrambled...

My understanding is that it's not so much a question of deliberate scrambling
as of using proprietary technology to solve the (difficult) problem of
putting a robust high-speed data stream into a video signal without hurting
picture quality.  There is a large gap between theory and practice here;
it's *not* as simple as an elementary textbook would make you think.

And as you point out, few people can be expected to help pay the bills
unless it's compulsory.  How much did you contribute to your local backbone
site's phone bills lately?

>	3) The service is to be accessed via local cable operators who own
>	the medium AND the vertical retrace time. They will want a cut...

The service can also be accessed via a dish, so there is a bound on how
much this can add to the costs.  Also, my understanding was that the
vertical interval belongs to Southern Satellite Systems, although possibly
it changes ownership when it hits the cable.

> The current usenet is estimated at about 2,000 sites many of which are
> multiple machines within the same organization -- I don't see most of these
> sites paying multiple site fees for each machine...

"Multiple machines?  Us?  Heavens no; only one of our machines gets that
traffic."  I don't see most such sites paying multiple site fees, either,
and the Stargate people would be silly to expect it.  The Stargate people
are not dummies, guys, nor are they vicious capitalist swine intent on
making bundles of money at our expense.  If Stargate costs a lot more than
Usenet, few people will bother.  They *know* that.

> [much discussion of possible costs]
>  ... I question if it will fly .... and will the
> result still be a usenet like service?

I hope it will be a *better* service.  Usenet is far from ideal.

> Why will people want to moderate the
> traffic for such a big business for free??

One obvious expense is that moderator time is not available in unlimited
amounts for free.  This is *already* a problem.  Moderators will probably
have to be paid something.

> Why should USENIX subsidize it?

Maybe because they think it has a chance of benefiting us all.

> Particularly if uucp/arpa/bitnet based usenet stays in tact as a cost free
> competitor...

Here we come to the heart of the matter.  Usenet *won't* stay intact as a
cost free competitor, because it is *not* "cost free" and never has been.
Its costs are rising steadily, to the point where it clearly cannot survive
in its present form too much longer.  Those sites who pay Long Distance
bills are subsidizing the freeloaders.  THIS WILL NOT CONTINUE FOREVER!

> I don't favor disbanding the technical communication within
> usenet for what is likely to be an expensive, general public, mass marketed
> data service...

The technical communication is already a minor part of Usenet, and getting
more minor all the time.  Considering Usenet's steadily-rising costs, it
will disband itself before too many more years whether we like it or not.
The question is, will there be an alternative in place when the crunch comes?

> To make stargate large enough to break make a profit, it will have to
> target larger populations...

This is very sensitive to what assumptions you make about costs.  Again,
you are being silly if you assume that the Stargate people are either
stupid or venal.  They have thought of these issues.

> With the usenet traffic opened up to such a large general population
> I question the quality of the resulting service as a technical forum.

In case you haven't noticed, we already have this problem.  Have you read
net.unix lately?

> A lot more can be done to improve the cost of the usenet long haul
> connections, which WILL LIKELY COST LESS THAN stargate.

And do less for us, in the long run.  Have you plotted the rise in traffic
against time?  I recently posted five years of data to net.news.  Try it.
Then figure out how much time each proposed cost-cutting measure buys us.
It's usually not a lot.

By the way, I'm glad to see an acknowledgement from you that Usenet is
*not* free.

> 	1) Upgrade the longhaul traffic to 9600/18000 baud or faster modems...

Don't forget compatibility with older modems; few sites have phone lines
that they can afford to *officially* dedicate to Usenet.  Don't forget
processing time; vanilla uucp on 750-class machines can't consistently
run even a 4800-baud line at full speed.  Don't forget that most of those
modems are very new and still have problems, notably in areas like flow
control between them and the host.

> 	2) Upgrade the uucp server to be full duplex --- IE carry traffic in
> 	both directions concurrently -- this will likely improve the
> 	connection costs about 30% for backbones and have little affect
> 	on leaf sites.

Are you volunteering to do it?  Usenet has never had any shortage of people
with great ideas, but we do have a shortage of people implementing them.
I also suspect that your estimate of cost improvement is high.

> 	3) Implement a better I-have/I-want transmission scheme that is
> 	real-time...

This amounts to redoing the transport mechanism completely, since uucp
doesn't support this.  That is a lot of work; I sure don't have time to
tackle it.

> 	4) Negotiate a reduced flatrate DDS nite service AS A GROUP with
> 	one of the long haul carriers...

Again, are you volunteering to do it?  Don't forget that we really do
need data-quality transmission, which is a lot scarcer than cruddy voice
circuits.  Also don't forget that many sites can get their Usenet phone
bills past the bean-counters only because they are *not* explicitly
identified as such.

> 	5) evaluate X.25 major city interconnections...

This is already being done, by many people independently.  It helps.
It doesn't constitute a long-term solution to the problems, though.

> High technology like stargate is neat -- but I think we are just starting
> another expensive data service by forging on past the experiment.

Since our current low-technology network isn't going to hold together too
much longer, Stargate sounds good to me.

> I think that USENIX should spend a matching sum to what it has on stargate
> to evaluate alternate technologies and their implementation/service costs
> before proceeding with stargate...

In case you didn't hear about it, Usenix solicited proposals of precisely
this kind recently.  I believe they got, essentially, none.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry



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