Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!mit-eddie!bloom-beacon!gatech!ncar!noao!mcdsun!mcdchg!clyde!watmath!looking!brad
From: b...@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
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!bbn.com!rsalz
From: rs...@bbn.com (Rich Salz)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: How to eliminate the cost of over 1/5 (or more) of net traffic
Message-ID: <719@fig.bbn.com>
Date: 10 May 88 13:11:40 GMT
References: <1616@looking.UUCP>
Organization: BBN Laboratories Inc., Cambridge MA
Lines: 10
In news.admin (<1...@looking.UUCP>), b...@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes:
>The important thing to remember is that binaries, sources and maps are
>not urgent, time-critical stuff.
If this is the criteria, then we could save 90% of the current costs.
The important thing to remember is that almost nothing that appears on
Usenet is urgent, time-critical stuff.
--
Please send comp.sources.unix-related mail to rs...@uunet.uu.net.
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!rick
From: r...@seismo.CSS.GOV (Rick Adams)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: How to eliminate the cost of over 1/5 (or more) of net traffic
Message-ID: <44308@beno.seismo.CSS.GOV>
Date: 10 May 88 15:47:40 GMT
References: <1616@looking.UUCP> <719@fig.bbn.com>
Organization: Center for Seismic Studies, Arlington, VA
Lines: 6
Summary: Not that crazy an idea
uunet already sends a weekly tape (full news feed) to South Korea,
Indonesia and the FBI.
Its not that crazy an idea.
---rick
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!looking!brad
From: b...@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: <1631@looking.UUCP>
Date: 11 May 88 06:01:56 GMT
References: <1616@looking.UUCP> <719@fig.bbn.com>
Reply-To: b...@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 24
>
>The important thing to remember is that almost nothing that appears on
>Usenet is urgent, time-critical stuff.
Well, not in the sense of "Delivery by 10:30 am or you don't pay," it
isn't, but most of what takes place on usenet is discussion, which is
improved by short propagation times.
Of course, when I say "improved," I mean "is easier." Long delays would
help stop flame wars and reduce volume, and that would be good in many
groups, but I don't think that's the goal right now.
No so with maps, sources and binaries. If a binary is 4 days late,
nothing really gets interfered with.
For other groups, as I have noted, the delay is a two edged sword. Many
people bitch about moderators, mostly because of the delay they cause, but
at the same time, the delay is one of the stronger cooling factors a
moderator brings to things, even if he/she doesn't censor.
I often delay stuff several weeks, but then again my group is mostly
not time critical in the discussion sense.
--
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!looking!brad
From: b...@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: b...@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
Newsgroups: news.admin
Path: utzoo!henry
From: he...@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: How to eliminate the cost of over 1/5 (or more) of net traffic
Message-ID: <1988May13.161045.4702@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1616@looking.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 13 May 88 16:10:45 GMT
> ... 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...
One minor negative aspect that's worth mentioning is that mailing tapes,
unlike queueing uucp transfers, requires significant amounts of human time.
(The AT&T Software Toolchest, for example, won't mail you a tape no matter
how much you beg and plead, last I heard.) If this is to be done it would
pretty well have to be done by UUNET or the equivalent, so that the tape
mailers can get paid. This also means that the old problem emerges: such
a service has to be explicitly bought, rather than just hidden in the
phone bills like a lot of Usenet traffic. Not impossible -- UUNET service
has to be explicitly bought, and a lot of people have managed that -- but
it limits the audience.
--
NASA is to spaceflight as | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
the Post Office is to mail. | {ihnp4,decvax,uunet!mnetor}!utzoo!henry
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!osu-cis!att!chinet!mcdchg!clyde!watmath!looking!brad
From: b...@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: <1645@looking.UUCP>
Date: 15 May 88 20:34:58 GMT
References: <1616@looking.UUCP> <719@fig.bbn.com> <1754@van-bc.UUCP>
Reply-To: b...@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 14
It is not important that map data be distributed urgently. If it takes
a few more days for monthly maps to come out, that isn't going to
cause trouble.
What is important is that they be distributed reliably (no missing parts)
and cheaply (because they're huge).
Any urgency can easily be handled by sending out just updates that
occur during the delay slower transmission methods would cause.
Physical mail with a backup of either couriers or phone transmissions
would be reliable and cheap.
--
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473
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