From: djk@bby.com.au (David James Keegel)
Subject: Re: Free Internet/Usenet Access
Followup-To: aus.aarnet,alt.bbs,comp.bbs.waffle
Organization: Burdett, Buckeridge & Young, Melbourne, Australia
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1992 06:39:10 GMT

Note: Followups will also be sent to aus.aarnet.
Please remove this if you don't want to discuss details of AARNet.

xyzzy@mertwig.UUCP (Daniel Drucker) writes:

]   [ about free net access ]
] > Utopia does not exist. I'm offering my colleague psychologists that are 
] > not "university affiliated" internet/usenet access for a fee of DFL 5 per 
] > month (about $ 2.50). You seem not to know what internet/usenett access 
] > costs me (in The Netherlands). Profit? The only way to have profit would 
] > be throwing my domain in the trashcan.

] Oh really. It may interest you to know that in most areas of the united 
] states (such as where I am) usenet access is free for the price of the 
] phone call each poll.

Yes, you USA residents are lucky.  In Australia, it costs at least A$250
(~US$175) per year to register an MX for domain to receive mail for an
organisation, with A$1000 (or US$700) being a more normal figure. (On a
technical note, there is some question about whether MXes can be bought,
but the fact is that you nominate MX records when you pay to be a
Mail Affiliate, and you can't get an MX registered in *.AU without 
paying AARNet, unless your traffic does not pass through AARNet.)

This is because there is ONE (1) TCP/IP link from Australia to the rest
of the world (via USA, strangely enough), apart from those run privately
by vendors (Sun, DEC, HP, etc) exclusively for their own use.  We don't
have a government which pays for basic network (TCP/IP) infrastructure.

The organisation which runs this link (AARNet, the Australian Academic
and Research Network) and links Uni's around the country seeks to recover
the costs of this 512kb/s link and interstate links by charging a flat
fee per annum to any organisation who wants e-mail traffic carried over
AARNet (and unless you want to pay A$1.20/min off peak to Telecom
Australia to call UUNET, there's not much you can do to avoid it).

While AARNet has different charges depending on e-mail/news only ($1000
or $4000) or full TCP/IP ($5000-$30000 in 5 steps according to link
speed, 4.8kbps to 64kbps), there are NO usage based charges.  (However,
if you are a huge e-mail user, you pay $4000 instead of $1000.)

In addition, Usenet is considered "free" (by AARNet; of course your
feed might charge you for connect time or whatever).  This is because
Usenet must be carried on the AARNet backbone regardless of how many
organisations receive it from their local Uni or commercial network
provider (it's assumed that the site can't *generate* a significant
volume of news in comparison to the total of Usenet).

] Also, do you know about GNU at all?

I certainly do (and mostly approve), but that's not the issue here. 
Do you know what international phone calls and leased lines cost?

-- 
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| David Keegel   <djk@bby.com.au>   Ph: +61 3 614-8922   Fax: +61 3 614-8742 |
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