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

[Axel Fischer]

In article <786 at redsox.bsw.com> campbell at redsox.bsw.com (Larry Campbell) writes:
>I really don't understand this.  Who do you have to pay the $200 to?
$200 goes to unido "University of Dortmund" the german backbone.

>In the US, you just find a local Usenet site with a friendly system
>administrator and set up a uucp link.  If it's a local call, it's free.
>What prevents you from doing that in Germany?  Even if local calls
>aren't free, $200/month seems hard to believe (I suspect that, with
>decent modems, I could get a full feed from California for less than
>that, at night time rates).
Sounds good.
But ... in germany unido have the monopol for the connection to USA. No one
(no system administrator) is allowed to give you a Newsfeed if your are not
registered at unido and if you don't pay the fee.
You get also every month a bill for the mailing costs.

>I could maybe understand people chipping in to defray the costs of the
>transatlantic traffic, but $200 per month per site??  There are presently
>235 sites listed in the German uucp map;  $200 x 235 = $47,000, and I
>can NOT believe that it costs $47,000 per month just to get Usenet
>traffic across the ocean!!
YOU'RE DAMN RIGHT !!!!! We all don't know either what they are doing with
this much money. We have no idea.
That's the reason why most of us don't get a lot of NewsGroups. The only
groups I get is alt.all not more. I get these only because a *very friendly*
SysAdm at the "Technical University of Berlin" (tub) gets them via a direkt
link to the USA.
If he wouldn't do that I wouldn't get a single group.

Recently unido has cut the prices a little bit but not much to help us.

The best thing would be someone calls the USA direct with 9600 and f-Protokoll
or via x25 and the rest help to pay the phone bill
(One Minute (day or night - no difference) to USA from germany is $1.75 !!!)

Hope I could have helped you. If you want to know more it's better via mail,
because this is a sourcen group.

-Axel

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