🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4793@freja.diku.dk> keld@freja.diku.dk (Keld J|rn Simonsen) writes:
>People want a reliable service, and thus Eunet has evolved
>to become more professional, as many of the backbones have
>hired staff and their own machines dedicated to EUnet services.

I don't think anybody is criticizing your backbone staffs or your 
professionalism. Or that somebody somewhere has to pay for their time.
I believe the bone of contention is that the costs are so high that you'll 
never get the little guy involved. This, in turn, keeps your costs high 
because you can't share the cost with more sites. 

>Of cause you may be able to do things cheaper if you run
>everything voluntarily and have free machines to your disposal,
>but for how long will it last ? Remember decvax, ucbvax, seismo
>and inhp4 ? The net has grown up and it is to big to run on
>an voluntary basis, at least in Europe.
>Danish IP/UUCP backbone

Let me ask you how many sites you feed in Denmark? How many full news feeds, 
how many mail customers?  Oh, you'll say you only have a small country, right?
Ok, what's the population then? I have a little old 386 here with a 338MB 
disk. I feed about 10 sites locally. I have access to a full feed from 3 
sites. I pay my own phone bill across the river (another state and higher 
charges). My main feed gets its feed from uunet mainly because they don't wish 
to impose on others (bpa or Bell of Pennsylvania and several other local 
sites). So, to be fair, as you would say, it costs about $250 (including phone 
delivery charges) to receive a good size feed from uunet. If everybody were to
just take then bpa would shut its doors to like the sites you mentioned.

My company has almost 200 customer clients receiving a selected news feed (end
user type stuff) and E-mail all over the USA.  We add about one a week.  Most
of these sites aren't even on the map as we serve as our own internal hub.  We
are but a small company.  But there are thousands of us.  This mostly possible
because our telephone system discounts its charges dramatically after 11PM.
So all this stuff goes on mostly at night.  It costs only 20 or 30 cents to
call 3000 miles across the country.

How can all this be possible? It is called economies of scale. The more people 
that use a service that has a certain fixed cost anyway, the cheaper it gets 
for everyone.

That is, unless you start making crazy rules about how this can't work!

What few of us here see in Europe is a willingness to try something different.
You seem so ademant about your professionalism and 'proper' procedures that
the whole process of more information interchange seems to have gotten stuck
with only a handful of users sharing inordinate costs.  It seems that they
like it that way just to keep the riff-raff out.
Fred Rump









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