An apology, and a question (about uucp in Germany)

[Stefan Loesch]

In article <786 at redsox.bsw.com> campbell at redsox.bsw.com (Larry Campbell) writes:
>
>Now, my question (and I'd prefer to get answers only from people in Germany,
>who know, rather than people in the US, who are guessing).  What is going on
Now, do I qualify ? I transfered here to Arizona last August. Before that
I was the postmaster (besides other things) of one of the few comercial sites
in Germany that had news (I think at that time it were around 10 or so).
The problem in Germany is manyfolded. Local calls in Germany are not free.
They cost about 12 cents per 10 minutes. If you're talking long distance
(within Germany!) you're also talking big bucks!
Local calls are VERY limited, and a lot of people don't live within the
"local" area of a major city with an university.
If you restrict yourself to let's say one MB per week (you know that this
is not much), and could get it locally then let's see: 1200 baud ==>
about 80 chars/sec (noise and protocoll overhead)
1MB (ca. 1000000 chars)/80 ==> 12500 seconds (or about 4 hours) ==>
about 2.50$. So far so good. NOW the big sledge hammer:
	There is one central backbone in Germany: unido or 
		University of Dortmund
	They claim (and I believe them), that the amounts they charge
	are just about covering their costs for maintaining the net
	services. They charge (for universities it's less):
		$ 20.00 for German (or is it European ?) mailservice
			plus charges per kilobyte
		$ 40.00 for international mailservice
			plus charges per kilobyte
		$ 200.00 for usenet services
That's also how the 235 sites are explained: a lot of them only have sub-
scribed to mailservices.

A student could get news from his university, but a lot of universities
simply don't have news, and if they do, time on computers is limited and
restricted. 

You could argue, that other sites could get the news and further
redistribute them, thus minimizing the cost. That's what happend in 
some cases, but immediately there was a discussion under way, wether that
should be allowed by unido. I've to clarify that one:
unido provides the services as part of your membership in the GUUG
(German Unix User Group) (though you still have to pay the above fees).
Since a lot of people have access to BBS's which are not a member
in the EUUG, they would get something (news) without having to pay
the membership fees (50.- $ ?) of EUUG.

I hope that clarifies the Situation in Germany a bit.
Sorry for the long followup in this group (but we want our German
friends to listen, don't we (-: ). I'm sure I've omitted half of the
facts and have the other half wrong, but if anybody from Germany
listens in (Hallo Andreas und andere postmaster!) they can correct me.

Stefan
	uunet!asuvax!mcdphx!yendor!stefan