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

[Juergen Wagner]

There are a few factors which make Usenet connections cheaper in the U.S.:

o Usenet in the U.S. is not a UUCP-only enterprise, i.e. there are large
  universities and companies with local Internets and a significant number
  of Usenet hosts.

o There are much more Usenet host in the U.S. than in Germany.

o In Germany, phone charges are typically higher. There is no flat rate, so
  you have to pay for every local call.

o Transatlantic phone charges are high, therefore the cost of passing on the
  huge volume of newsgroups to Europe is expensive (even though some newsgroups
  are not available in Europe).

o Unido, the German backbone site at the University of Dortmund is the ONLY
  backbone site in Germany. It receives news via mcvax in Amsterdam.

Please note that I am not defending the current news situation in Germany!
This is the state of affairs.

I am not up-to-date on the charges for phone lines, X.25 lines, etc. but it
is clear that with the monopoly the German Bundespost has on communication
services via phone lines or radio waves, maintaining a private Usenet site
is much more costly than in the U.S. If I had a computer at home (= here in
Stanford), I guess I could get a newsfeed from some Stanford machine without
too much trouble. Having subscribed to a flat rate (which is reasonable if you
own a dialin terminal, anyway), the cost could be very close to zero!

What is being developed is a high-speed research Internet based on ISO-OSI,
which may make receiving news and e-mail from overseas much cheaper because
of gateways to NSFnet. It may however take a while until this network is
fully established and able to support hosts other than those at universities,
research institutions and large companies...

-- 
Juergen Wagner		   			gandalf at csli.stanford.edu
						 wagner at arisia.xerox.com