Re: Reducing Usenet Bandwidth

[Simon Lyall <simon.lyall () ihug co nz>]

On Sun, 3 Feb 2002, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> The major drawback of that protocol is that it limits articles size to
> 64KB, so it does not reduce binary traffic, which is the largest part
> of a newsfeed.

In which case you just modify the protocol (or roll your own) to have
articles spread across multiple packets. It's not that hard and our guys
did this and I expect it's been done (at least) half a dozen times by
other people.

Anyway multicasting thing doesn't solve the problem really, you still
have to transport 30Mb/s (plus) from outside you network to inside it, put
it onto a (relativly expensive) server and give it to the customers.

The economics of the whole exercise are very interesting once you get past
disccussion ( worth doing for anybody ) and picture groups (worth
doing for all but the smallest ISP). Comitting to a good supply for
multi-part binary groups probally should involve sitting down with one
of the company accountants (if you only have one accountant then your
company is probally to small).

-- 
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