Text 11312, 96 rader
Skriven 2005-08-01 05:36:32 av Matt Bedynek (1:106/1)
     Kommentar till en text av Ward Dossche
Ärende: Fidonews Echo Rules
===========================
Hello Ward.

31 Jul 05 11:06, you wrote to me:

 WD> I can only say that I never paid a penny in a cost-sharing system nor
 WD> was I ever asked to. But I do know of a sysop who charged each of his
 WD> points 6.000BFR a year for mail ... that would be about US$160 ...
 WD> with close to a hundred points this is not exactly cost-recuperation.

 WD> I was never charged anything and as a consequence I never charged
 WD> anyone anything for anything in Fido. Even obsolete equipment was
 WD> never sold 2nd hand but always given away.

Arguably, I believe the availability and use of commercial services contributed
to fidonet's rapid inflation (just prior to the decline).  There is only so
much one can do with limited resources.  An example would be running an
internet hub on a POTS internet connection.  It's not going to happen.  Sure,
you can move a little mail but feeding many nodes, especially in days when
traffic levels were at least 10X (or greater) than they are today is going to
make that service unreliable and very very slow.

 WD> The deal was that "You get everything free here, so you provide
 WD> everything free as well to others."

 WD> Makes sense?

That was the philosphy I adopted when I started offering free mail connections.
Note: I started doing this in a time when anyone with a 128K or greater
connection still charged money for feeds!  ISDN was the best you could get for
a stable and semi fast connection and there were no dynamic DNS services that
worked reliabily.  So, the only way was with ISDN and dedicated (static
addresses) access.

Initially, I charged $15 for a full connection whereas others asked for $20,
$25, or $30.  At that time, I paid $150/mo for the ISDN circuit and $150/mo for
the Internet connectivity.  Then at some point, I started getting involved in
nonprofit projects and negotiated my dedicated Internet connectivity for free.
That was when I started giving away mail feeds free but still asked $$ for
filebone connections.  I did give away a few free file connections if I knew
the person I was feeding in turn, feed a large number of people, and did so
freely.  That way, I could refer people seeking file feeds to that person.  I
only had so much space, even on 128K.

After giving away free mail feeds, my hub grew from a small volume hub to the
second largest.  Somewhere around there, Souvestre offered "peering" so I no
longer had to pay for his service.  And, sometime after that, due to some
lawsuit, SWBELL had to give me ISDN access for the same price that people in
Houston paid even though it was a "special curcuit".  This made my ISDN line
cost ~$50/mo.  :-)  So I said, fuck it, everything is free now! :-)  Just had
to limit how many I fed (files).  That was the days when you might get at least
one request per week for a feed.  At least I did...

The 5 years, I have been bless with great deals on server co-location on
highspeed connectivity because I continue to run free projects.  So, everything
remains free today! :-)

 WD> It gets even better ... one day I got a totally free line from my
 WD> employer and a modem-importer provided a free 19.2KB modem, at that
 WD> time a state of the art machine. From that moment on mail instead of
 WD> be picked-up was delivered ... free of charge. A single inbound
 WD> message sparked immediate distribution to all downlinks and
 WD> echoail/netmail/files travelled by near-internet-speed.

 WD> As no-one had any calling-costs everybody was able to save
 WD> telephone-money and invest in high-speed modems which became very
 WD> handy the day my telephone-deal died some 9 months later.

 WD> At that time mail and files was already being funnelled transatlantic
 WD> via IP between Randy Bush and Henk Wevers so most of that cost was
 WD> eliminated while a little bit later the internet broke-out everywhere.

 WD> I think we did a pretty good deal here by keeping it free of charge
 WD> for everyone in comparison to other countries here where it caused
 WD> cost-share wars between different empires.

I am fairly confident that in some nets, there were profit being made.  There
was a cost sharing war in this net but I don't know if the other group was
upset over lost profit.  The new coop did very well and importing mail was not
as hard as they claimed it would be!  The new coop, called tcrs, was a true
coop that published all their cost sharing and financial data.  So everyone
knew they were being done fairly!  Cost sharing can be a great thing if done
right.

The commercial services are WYSIWYG.  You can't bitch about them because you
know up front you pay or you walk away.  I didn't run a true cost sharing
system but I never recouped ~10% of what I was paying out so nobody could
complain. :-)



Matt

e-mail: matt [at] thunderdome.us | icq: 16568532 | yahoo: mbedynek

---
 * Origin: ..::[ high speed feeds - http://fido.thunderdome.us/ ]::.. (1:106/1)