Reducing Usenet Bandwidth

Sat Feb 2 20:20:59 UTC 2002

Hi all,
 as we all know Usenet traffic is always increasing, a large number of
people take full feeds which on my servers is about 35Mb of continuous
bandwidth in/out. That produces about 300Gb per day of which only a small
fraction ever gets downloaded.

The question is, and apologies if I am behind the times, I'm not an expert
on news... how is it possible to reduce bandwidth used occupied by news:

a) Internally to a network
If I site multiple peer servers at exchange and peering points then they
all exchange traffic, all inter and intra site circuits are filled to the
above 35Mb level.

b) Externally such as at public peering exchange points
If theres 100 networks at an exchange point and half exchange a full feed
thats 35x50x2 = 3500Mb of traffic flowing across the exchange peering LAN.

For the peering point question I'm thinking some kind of multicast thing,
internally I've no suggestions other than perhaps only exchanging message
ids between peer servers, hence giving back a partial feed to the local
box's external peers.

Any thoughts? 

TIA

Steve

-- 
Stephen J. Wilcox
IP Services Manager, Opal Telecom
http://www.opaltelecom.co.uk/
Tel: 0161 222 2000
Fax: 0161 222 2008