From: elendil@mintir.new-orleans.la.us (Edward J. Branley)
Newsgroups: alt.bbs
Subject: Re: Sad to say...
Date: Sun, 13 Sep 92 08:31:32 CDT
Organization: Minas Tirith BBS (Public Access Usenet for New Orleans)

davidg@aegis.or.jp (Dave McLane) writes:

> >You're on the right track.  The biggest problem for all of the fido-technolo
> >nets is the costs involved.  All of the fido sites are dialup lines, no T1
> >technology here.  That means that sysops are shelling out a lot of their own
> >bucks to ld carriers.  Usenet's reliance on institutional systems for the
> >backbone is one of the reasons it's so much more widespread.
>
> On the other hand, it means that sysops willing to spend money can
> control the flow of traffic, something I call "economic copyrighting" :-)

This is *exactly* what has happened with the Fidonet echomail backbone.  Those
who are in positions of authority are the ones who have the bucks.  If they
don't want something to be transmitted, they don't have to allow it.  The
reason they got into co-ordinator positions in the first place is because they
had the only fast modem in their area, or a hard drive big enough to pull in a
full feed.

> In light of sysops paying for ld carriers, another question I have
> about Fido is how much traffic in terms of *volume* there is. Not
> just in terms of number of echos (which I think is the more or less
> the equivalent of a USENET newgroup) and not just in terms of number
> of messages, but total k-bytes/day.
>
> The sysops in Tokyo claim "it's not so expensive" but I it costs me
> about 15,000 yen ($120) per month (at 3.3 yen/minute) in local telco
> charges to get my feed. At low night rates (110 yen/minute to the
> U.S.; cheapest place to call from Japan) that would cost about 33.3
> times as much or $4,000/month. Conclusion: either they are a lot
> richer than I can imagine or they don't get a lot of volume....
>
> Do you have any information on the volume in k-bytes for Fido?
>
> Dave
>
> --
> Dave McLane
> JUNET: davidg@aegis.or.jp (ONLY within Japan: post otherwise)
> Nagaokakyoshi, Kyoto Japan Tel: +81-75-951-1168 Fax: +81-75-957-1087

hmmm...well, it's been about eight months since I took a fidonet feed into this
system, so bear in mind that these numbers are that old, but I was taking in
somewhere around 1-2 meg of .ZIPped echomail packets a day.  That unzips out to
around 2-4 meg.  What you have to remember is that fidonet-technology nets
handle transfer of binary files quite differently than Usenet.  Here we encode
a file and post its components as news articles.  Fido-technology mailers
handle direct binary transfer, so that could add several meg/day to a feed if
one was in several of the file distribution nets.  File transfer is one area
where the fact that fidonet is more homogenous in terms of machine type is an
asset.  Rarely are source files transmitted (except in programing-related
areas) because PC binaries are really all that is necessary.

It's also easier to discriminate in terms of what you want and don't want to
carry in fidonet.  For example, my news feed only has 256 bytes for a feeds
entry for my site.  As a result, it's much easier for them if I just take full
heirarchies rather than trying to select individual groups.  This means I'm
taking in more than I really need to.  No biggie, it's a free feed and a free
call.  In fidonet, however, there are several good control programs that a
sysop could use to handle additions/deletions of echos from their feeds.  Thus,
it's easy for a sysop to only take the echos he/she's interested in, keeping
the overall phone bill down as much as possible.  Also, most fidonet sites now
use ZIP compression, which does a much better job than compress.

As to overseas stuff, Randy would be the better person to ask, as he does a lot
of that.  I used to have several sysops who would call my system from Europe to
get Novell stuff that I would get off of Compu$pend, but that was because the
Compu$pend charges in Europe were actually more expensive than calling me.




>Edward J. Branley         elendil@mintir.new-orleans.la.us<
>Seashell Software, Metairie, LA            +1-504-455-5087<
Newsgroups: alt.bbs