Date: Fri, 18 Apr 1997 18:23:04 -0400 From: Sysadmin <danlaw@rust.net> To: Damian Hamill <damian@cablenet.net> Cc: dg@root.com, freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: News... Message-ID: <3357F448.34A9@rust.net> References: <199704181657.JAA02594@root.com> <3357C27A.63DECDAD@cablenet.net>
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Damian Hamill wrote: > > David Greenman wrote: > > > > > I must be seriously missing something here. I thought ISPs were in business > > to make money? It seems to me that if you make more money by providing all of > > the content of Usenet (WHATEVER that might be), then that's what you should > > do. If you chose to chop out 90% of the Usenet content with full knowledge > > that you will lose customers and make less money, than that's just being a > > morality Czar and has nothing to do with the economics. > > One of the principle costs in running an ISP is the cost of bandwidth. > Usenet is a big hit on bandwidth, the cost of which is disproportionate > to the revenue generated from those that actually use it. Anything > which can reduce this major cost centre will be beneficial to ALL ISPs, > regardless of size. > > There just isn't enough bandwidth... ever... True. As the internet evolves the customer will be using it and the bandwidth they buy from you more completely. But will next month's debate be over CU-Seeme (sp?), RealVideo, Push technology, or fully utilized PPP connections caused by someone's new program to stop long transfers during web browsing, so that http can still take place at full speed as well? How to forbid, suppress, or eliminate such advances in technology as menaces to ISP profits, and yet somehow be able to present less services as "better service"? Obvious tech fix for news: software that will suck only the articles of reasonable size from a set of newsgroups you desire, presumably those desired by customers. Result: only takes backbone bandwidth once, the rest of the transactions being between your customers and your news server. Usually with considerable delays between such transactions for reading the articles, or at least scanning them. OTOH, this would result in the bandwidth hit being transferred to more web browsing by customers unsatisied with the selection you have made for them, or even the customers reading news directly through your backbone, the long news active files eating up their time and the valuable bandwidth. Could result in keeping users on semi-"unlimited" accounts on longer with little utility to the ISP or the user who must wait for the file. As for the "regardless of size", there will be a point where the bandwidth tradeoff will be in favor of a newsfeed that serves most/all users. Of course it would be peachy keen if one could sell bandwidth to users without needing to buy the bandwidth to sell. It would be wonderful too if all an ISP's customers were already experienced and needed no tech support personnel hooking up, or if T1 lines were installed in a week when needed. But Usenet is not going to dry up and blow away, I suspect. TANSTAFFL. Well, maybe anti-Usenet ISPs in general can hire a bunch of PR people to tell those nasty inconvenient competitors who *do* provide newsgroups to go away and die, please. But I doubt it will work much better than the efforts by major ISPs to persuade the smaller ones to do the same. Not that I'd mind - would be amusing, and to paraphrase Jack Rickard of _Boardwatch_, there'll be some great deals on equipment and office furniture at the auction.
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