🚀 go-pugleaf

>	1) UKC have to find about quarter of a million pounds each year to
>	cover their costs. In your scheme, UKC would have to recover this from

	I wonder if a less expensive scheme is possible.

	a) Is it *impossible* to find a company/university who gets the
	   news, even if they don't redistribute them ? If not you can 
	   get the news from them. This saves 9 mega bytes of downloading
	   from US each day.
        b) Use as much as possible existing equipement, as long as it
	   does not costs anything. There is an incredible amount of
	   modems/phone-lines/machine in use during 50% of the time (at most)
	   *everywhere*.
	c) Calculate the costs for the rest (i.e. communication time,
	   maintainance for machines/modems, additional disque space and
	   so).

	Of course this suggestion is not realistic. Not because it is
not possible to build a USENET connexion on this principle. But because
choice have been made toward a USENET industry in Europ. I have
the feeling that each USENET backbone is a company. At some point a choice
was made that influenced the evolution of USENET in Europ. Instead of
searching the least expensive scheme, the backbone managers tried to
achieve the independance of the backbones.
	The practical result is good in a way. EUnet is very structured.
Full time people take care of it and the quality of the service is fairly
good. One can be sure that the backbone will still be in function two or
three years from now. The backbones cannot be broken more than 1 day. And
such a failure is rare.
	But a side effect of this situation is the exclusion of all the small
sites and the individuals. The one who can't pay the backbone fees *and* the
communications.  There is also the (frequent) case of a company where newsfeed
is considered a loss of time. This kind of company will not pay the backbone
fees, even if they can.
	My feeling is that all the people flaming backbones (in this
discussion an previous ones) have the same problem : how to get news
for free ? How to post a small amount of articles ? How to have a
e-mail address ? This population is not marginal and they often 
constitute the most active part of USENET.

	It seems that the backbones are not willing to offer a solution.
So we have to build it. We (Association GNA, Agence France Presse, 
Axis Design) offer a read only newsfeed. 
	Speeds are 1200, 2400, 4800 (V.32), 9600 (V.32), 19200 (PEP).
	There is no fees and it is in France. We don't mind if
someone connect from foreign countries. But it will be *a lot more* expensive
than the backbone connexion.

	Contact me (loic@adesign.uucp or loic@afp.uucp) to get more
information.

	Loic
--
Loic Dachary 	loic@adesign.uucp or loic@afp.uucp 
Voice		+33 1 40 35 20 20