Does anyone know of one?
Hell, has anyone even considered starting one?
For that matter, would anyone be interested or willing to pay for their
services if someone did or is bandwidth so cheap that it's just not
needed anymore?
...rdc
Does anyone know of one?
No but would probably be interested as a customer.
Hell, has anyone even considered starting one?
Possibly.
Does anyone know of one?
No.
Hell, has anyone even considered starting one?
No, and I doubt anybody seriously has. As a former employee, I can vouch
that the transponder costs were prohibitive to any start-up. It's
possible that a large established provider might be able to absorb the
lease, I doubt it. If it was going to happen, it would've happened when
Cidera was available for pennies on the dollar (my assumption, not a known
fact).
As it stands, the uplink dishes are still sitting unused behind Bergmann's
cleaners in Laurel, MD. Damn shame.
-J.
Hadn't it gotten to the point shortly before Cidera folded that the
satellite bandwidth was so insufficient for a "full feed" that it was of
questionable value?...or was it still fine if you wanted a usenet feed
with no binaries?
Hadn't it gotten to the point shortly before Cidera folded that the
satellite bandwidth was so insufficient for a "full feed" that it was of
questionable value?...or was it still fine if you wanted a usenet feed
with no binaries?
Probably. Yes.
IIRC, a full feed of usenet (3 years ago) was approx 250GB+ per day. The
overwhelming majority of that was multi-part binaries. Cut them out and
you should have plenty of room across the transponder, which (again, 3
years ago) was capable of DS3 capacity.
I haven't had the misfortune of dealing with usenet feeds since then, so
I'm unfamiliar with the requirements of nntp peering today.
-J.
People still use usenet? 
Seriously though, you'd have to be an awfully large organization for
outsourced news to not be a slam dunk financially.
Andy
Probably. Yes.
> IIRC, a full feed of usenet (3 years ago) was approx 250GB+
> per day. The overwhelming majority of that was multi-part
> binaries. Cut them out and you should have plenty of room
> across the transponder, which (again, 3 years ago) was capable
> of DS3 capacity.
> I haven't had the misfortune of dealing with usenet feeds
> since then, so I'm unfamiliar with the requirements of nntp
> peering today.
A dedicated OC3 wouldn't really be enough any more, for the full feed
(150+ megabits at peak times, average maybe 130 megabits over a day -
i.e. 1300 - 1350 GB/day on a heavy day).
Cut out the multipart binaries upstream and you only need about a
megabit.
Jon, I recall some reported problems along those lines. That
even without binaries, they were running out of overhead. Given that
USENET volume tends to grow, I'm betting that it would require a lot
more capacity now.
When I first talked to someone using SkyCache about 5 years ago,
at the time, they were a very happy customer because they'd been able
to offload 12-13 Mbit/s from one of their transit DS-3s by taking a
SkyCache feed.
However, that was late 1999 or so, and transit prices were
more than an order of magnitude higher than they are now. In those
days, a lot of SPs were still running their own newsservers, and very
few companies were providing outsourced reader access to news.
These days, it doesn't make a lot of sense for many SPs to
deal with the hassle of taking feeds and maintaining a newsserver,
so they outsource reader access for their 4 or 5 customers who are
aware that there is something besides the WWW out there.
SkyCache was a really nice idea, but given that the number
of SPs running their own newsservers has shrunk considerably, and
that the outsourced news people won't be interested, the market is
much smaller overall. On top of that, the bandwidth requirements
have increased, while transit cost has plummeted. As a service,
it existed to mitigate the bandwidth requirements of running a
newsserver -- now that transit costs have crashed, and many more
people are outsourcing their news, I just don't see a viable
market in providing push feeds over satellite. I don't know what
transponder space is running, but I'm willing to bet it has not
gotten much (if any) cheaper.
--msa
IIRC, our transceiver's switch port hovered right around 28mbps. The
trouble with a non-binaries feed is most of the ISP customers who know
what usenet is want it for the binaries.
Now...if there were napster for pr0n, then abpe would be unnecessary 
there is: it's called kazaa. up to a point where you can't search for a song
(if you were so illegally inclined) without getting a bunch of t&a in the
search results.
paul
I'll bite, and reveal my ultimate cluelessness here.
Assuming I wanted to go about setting up an NNTP server, how would I go about getting and maintaining the feeds? There's no "central" authority AFAIK, but does anyone have any knowledge as to relative price and/or bandwidth consumption?
-Dan
I'll bite, and reveal my ultimate cluelessness here.
Assuming I wanted to go about setting up an NNTP server, how would I go about getting and maintaining the feeds? There's no "central" authority AFAIK, but does anyone have any knowledge as to relative price and/or bandwidth consumption?
First, you go out and buy the biggest server you can find, buy more drive space than you can afford. Then, buy more. You *may* be able to get a feed from your upstream service providers. You'll want to have at least 2 feeds and you should have at least OC-3 to each provider to handle the feeds. Don't expect much of the OC-3 left over for other uses. In a couple days you'll have all the warez and pr0n you'll ever need.
We were customers up until some months before they folded...and even
though we canceled about the same time they tried to "jack up" the monthly
rates (I think our take it or leave us rate increase was 3x), we were kept
on their mailing lists...so we kept getting notifications from them.
"Sorry guys, we're going out of business. Oh wait, no we're not.
Hmm...yeah, we are."
IIRC, we were getting regular complaints from a handful of users about
incomplete multipart posts and groups missing articles...I know, different
versions of the same problem. We were also busting at the seams of our
drive space and chose to outsource rather than build an even bigger
server.
AFAIK, we still have one or more dishes and several receivers kicking
around somewhere.
No you won't. You'll be searching for a CD ISO and find 798/800 parts.
The other two were 'missed' because you didn't give it enough bandwidth
and the upstream expired the article before you could get to it.
Adrian, glad his news server(s) don't have to carry alt.binaries.
You get a feed mostly by knowing someone who gives it to
you. Sometimes knowing somebody who knows somebody else who can give it to
you also works. More hops are generally a problem.
Bandwidth consumption strongly depends on what newsgroups you will be
having on your newsserver. On a small local hierarchy the
9600Bd Modem might still do. For a full feed >100Mbit/s are needed.
Nils