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

[Larry Campbell]

Recently a student in Germany posted a "Hello, anyone out there, please
post if you can hear me, because receiving mail costs me money" message
to alt.sources.

I flamed him (although mildly, I thought at the time) for causing such
a waste of net bandwidth.

Apparently he took the flame very personally and was hurt.  For that,
I apologize.

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
in Germany that makes getting a news feed so unbelievably expensive?  I am
really curious about this.  One of the followups to the original posting
said:

> This here is germany not USA. We have no chance to join the UseNet without
> having major costs. As you may have followed the discussion in news.admin
> you know that we have a very difficult position here.
> I'm a student too and I have around $200 costs per month to join UseNet as
> an UNOFFICIAL host not know by unido.
> For every KB mail I received it's charged for $0.70.

I really don't understand this.  Who do you have to pay the $200 to?
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).

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!!

Please educate me!
-- 
Larry Campbell                          The Boston Software Works, Inc.
campbell at bsw.com                        120 Fulton Street
wjh12!redsox!campbell                   Boston, MA 02146