My cursory investigations reveal there is no apparent alternative to Cidera in
the US right now. I'd be interested in talking to anyone who knows the
technology behind uplinking a newsfeed in order to replace Cidera's news
service. I'd guess there is a whole lot of infrastructure on the client end
collecting dust as of today.
I have found a possible source of satellite bandwidth for this, assuming a
critical mass of users could be accumulated to pay for it. Interested parties
should send me an email off list please.
Regards
Marshall Eubanks
If a critical mass of users could be accumulated to pay for it, I imagine
Cidera would still be in business.
Is USENET still a cost-effective way to distribute porn and pirated
software?
If Cidera had ever returned our calls or email to tell us the services they offered after they installed the dish on the roof of our datacenter and the server and satellite receiver in our rack, they might still be in business. 
From those I've talked to, I'm not the only one who never actually used any services from them because we weren't sure exactly what those services were or what they cost. Something about a DS3 of bandwidth for an ihave news feed for $350-500/month was mentioned before they installed anything and I agreed to it verbally. They were awfully anxious to get that dish installed. Perhaps due to loan covenants that they deploy x installations per month?
-Robert
btw- Installation of the dish and the PIII 1U server with mirrored HDDs were all given to us for free. I REALLY didn't get their business model and I still don't...
Tellurian Networks - The Ultimate Internet Connection
http://www.tellurian.com | 888-TELLURIAN | 973-300-9211
"Good will, like a good name, is got by many actions, and lost by one." - Francis Jeffrey
> I have found a possible source of satellite bandwidth for this, assuming a
> critical mass of users could be accumulated to pay for it. Interested
parties
> should send me an email off list please.If a critical mass of users could be accumulated to pay for it, I imagine
Cidera would still be in business.
When I last looked into them in depth, which was a while ago (2001), they seemed
very top heavy, set up to distribute streaming media over satellite for
a market and price point that never materialized.
Is USENET still a cost-effective way to distribute porn and pirated
software?
I have no clue. I just know that there is possibility to replace it.
Anyone have any idea how many ISP's got the usenet feed ?
Marshall
At the last company I worked for, I replaced our terrestrial news feeds
with Cidera. The first flyer we received from them they were called
Skycache, but they changed their name by the time we got to contract to
Cidera. (Should have been my first warning?)
Only complaints I had about their service before I left were they
wouldn't offer a filter before transmission service. It would have cut
down on the transmit load and saved some time for my news server if they
were filtering before it got to me.
They were also slow in giving us the information to have a terrestrial
backup, but eventually we got the backup information and it helped fill in
a few more gaps.
It was extremely nice to take the NNTP load off of our upstream links when
we first set it up. As I understood it, they were not doing well on binary
feeds towards the end there though.
Few people have found a profitable model for doing NNTP services.
Useful stuff is on groups.google.com. Most anything else is illegal in the
U.S.
I used to get a kick out of watching our newsgroups usage statistics. Any
recommendations for someone I can outsource NNTP services to off list
would be appreciated. It's one option I am looking at for my current
company.
Gerald
Only complaints I had about their service before I left were they
wouldn't offer a filter before transmission service. It would have cut
down on the transmit load and saved some time for my news server if they
were filtering before it got to me.
I think they couldn't do this because it was a broadcast transmission, and
not point to point. Any pre-transmission filter would be applied to
everyone.
It was extremely nice to take the NNTP load off of our upstream links when
we first set it up. As I understood it, they were not doing well on binary
feeds towards the end there though.
I think they ended up filtering posts over a certain length over a year
ago (?). They were approaching 45-50MBit/s, and when they implemented
that filter they cut it back to about 30. Not exactly a full feed, but
how much porn do you actually need? 
We ended up supplementing their feed with a text-only feed from one of our
upstreams, just to make sure we weren't missing anything that someone
might actually care about (i.e. non-porn).
Adam Maloney
Systems Administrator
Sihope Communications
I don't want to start speculating on certain issues, but I worked there
between 4/00 and 4/01 as one of the engineers responsible for
maintaining the uplink servers and other satellite doohickeys, so I can
speak factually on certain events and paths we went down. Although Mike
Donovan or Lisa Peoples would be able to explain much of this better
than yours truly, I'll give it my best shot (as I remember it).
As the Internet grew, NNTP traffic grew exponentially. Binary
attachments were the bane of our existence, but... so long as we had the
transponder throughput to accomodate our recipe of HTTP/NNTP/AV/etc, we
avoided filtering as long as technically feasible. Unfortunately, it
quickly became obvious that while NNTP was what was paying the bills
(hypothetically... since too many ISP's were apparently too damn cheap
to pay their bills), it was also choking the 45MB we could fit through
the transponder.
At one point in time, we were trying to push 250-260Gb/day across the
transponder (roughly 22-30Mbps peak, IIRC). This left very little for
our other "products". When it started to smother the rest, we were
forced to start filtering on incomplete multi-part binaries. Some of
our clients started bitching (some did from the beginning), as they
would miss the occassional multi-part binary and blame Cidera. This was
*not* any fault of ours, as we would push out everything we had. As a
usenet peer, we were victim to incompletes just like anyone else (even
with our excellent range of peer sources... thanks to M.D.). The only
other type of "filtering" that might have occurred was throttling on the
uplink.
I have no doubt that things had changed drastically since the day I was
laid off in April '01 (coincidentally, the day our SysEng staff went
from 2 to 1). NNTP continued to increase, and likely always will.
Folks like Donovan, Peoples, McGuire, Krokes, Humphrey and the rest did
their damndest to provide a kick-ass product at a fraction of the cost
of conventional terrestrial lines. I miss that place and the work we
did with a serious passion. It was just one of those ideas and
opportunities that doesn't come across very often, and I was damn lucky
to be considered a [very] small part of it. *sigh*
Cheers to the happy fun ball.