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

[David Wright]

To those who wonder why news is so expensive in many European
countries, I suggest you print off the postscript news distribution
maps that Brian Ried has posted in news.lists.   You will see that many
countries have very few news sites (and many sites have mail but not
news).  It costs $$$$ to bring news across the Atlantic, but that cost
is spread over many sites.  Unfortunately it also costs $$$ to
transport news across national boundaries, and where there are only a
few sites to share this cost, plus the costs of the national backbone
site, news is expensive.    Because it is expensive, few sites
participate, and so it stays expensive.

The EUUG subsidises the Eunet to some extent, but most costs have to be
paid by the participating sites.  There is some hope of government
subsidy in the future (the CEC may pay for a fast European network),
which would put us in a similar position to much of the US (though with
civil rather than military funding), but at present the user must pay.

Some posters have suggested that European sites should 'get a
Trailblazer and import news directly'.    Well, TB's would help, so
lots of us are getting them (UKUUG has negociated a discount on
them, as have some other national UUG's), but are not *that* magic.
A news feed from the US of all technical groups - leaving out all talk 
and most rec as at present in Europe - would cost about $50,000 per
year in transmission costs over IPSS (X.25), but only about $10,000
via Trailblazer.    Would you pay $10K for news?  Some would, but
not many.   

So we have to club together to cover transmission costs to our national
backbones.   We also have to pay for the associated computer and staff
costs -- most Eunet backbone sites are universities, and being both
non-profitmaking and also less well endowed than many US universities
they cannot absorb the cost of providing a service to lots of other
establishments that are not directly associated,  (why should the
University of Kent (ukc) subsidise STC or University Dortmund (unido)
subsidise netmbx?   Explain your reasons using not more than 5000
words.   Your paper will be marked by the University's auditors).

Some sites declare 'UDI' - good luck to them.  If they make all their
own arrangements to deliver and pick up their mail, they incur no costs
on the rest of us.   But in practice this is very difficult, and so
such sites find they do need to use the Eunet, and thus cannot avoid a
duty to share its costs.

I should point out that most sites in Europe work in the same way as
in the USA - we pass on news/mail to other sites without charge, on
a 'you call us' basis, accepting the costs we incurr in managing a
news/mail feed to others as a fair exchange for the same boon others
give us.   But this cannot apply to the backbone sites that move
news across international boundaries: such costs do not balance out.

In the UK we are lucky - with over 400 sites on the UK net, news costs
per site are reasonable.   Volume is so high that ukc now has a leased
line to mcvax (which as you may know has a fast leased line to uunet).
The actual mail costs per kByte have reduced considerably as a result.
But we still have some problems here with mail costs.  Ukc makes no
charge for handling mail within the UK (except for a quarterly
subscription to commercial sites), but they do pass on their
communications costs of 2 pence (about 3 cents) per kbyte for
international mail.   Some sites decide they cannot pay this, so ukc
reject international mail to/from them.   They may appear in UK maps,
and receive UK mail OK, but foreign mail is bounced:  this can be very
confusing to the foreign senders!   If anyone has any suggestions on how
else to deal with this, other than that those who do pay should
subsidise those who won't, I'm sure we'd like to hear them.

Even in the UK the subscription cost of a news feed ($50 per month),
very reasonable for any commercial organisation, is too much for
someone trying to get their own news feed to their own home computer,
and I understand it is higher in Germany.   Such people could sign up
with a public access site, and read news there instead of trying to get
it all on their own machine.   In Germany, netmbx (Berlin) offers very
reasonable rates for news reading (plus a little more if you post).
I do not know which news groups netmbx gets.   Mail me if you want
their PSS number.  I regret that I do not know a UK public access site,
though I believe they exist.

-- 
Regar